Capernaum

I arrived at Capernaum before eight in the morning, when the site opens and the tour buses have not yet assembled in the parking lot. The Franciscan monks who manage the grounds were unlocking gates and watering potted plants by the entrance, and I was the second person through after a lone German pilgrim with a worn leather Bible. The path from the gate winds through date palms and eucalyptus that the monastery planted decades ago, and then the ruins open up — black basalt walls barely knee-height, their stone so dark they seem to absorb the early light rather than reflect it. The Sea of Galilee was fifty meters to my right, flat and still, and the air smelled of fresh water and eucalyptus resin and, faintly, of the fish markets in Tiberias seven kilometers south.

What makes Capernaum strange and compelling is its architectural collision. The ruins of the first-century fishing village — the walls and floors of a community that archaeology confirms was active during the period the Gospels describe — spread across a large open area near the water. Over the ruins of what tradition identifies as the house of Peter, a modern Catholic church from 1990 hovers on concrete pillars, suspended like a flying saucer above the ancient stones. It is an odd architectural decision, and at first I found it almost offensive — this imposition of contemporary form over something so old. But standing beneath it, I changed my mind. The glass floor of the church lets worshippers look down at the ruins below, and the structure makes no attempt to pretend it belongs to the same century. There is an honesty in the contrast that centuries of medieval churches built directly over sacred sites do not offer. You see the distance between then and now very clearly, and that distance is part of the meaning.

The synagogue is the other astonishment. Its white limestone columns and carved decorations are out of place in a site otherwise built entirely from black basalt — because they are. The white synagogue dates from the fourth or fifth century CE, built atop the foundations of an earlier first-century synagogue made from the same dark stone as everything else around it. Archaeologists have excavated the lower black basalt structure beneath the white building, and you can see both layers through a metal grating in the floor. The upper synagogue’s decorations include carved stone reliefs of a menorah, an ark, and what may be a Torah shrine — images of things that mattered intensely to people who lived here seventeen hundred years ago, in a language of carved stone that survived when everything else crumbled.

By nine o’clock the first tour group arrived — forty South Korean pilgrims moving together with a guide holding a flag, stopping at each interpretive sign for a group prayer. I did not find this intrusive. There is something about witnessing other people’s sincere devotion in a place that has absorbed devotion for two thousand years that becomes part of the experience rather than a disruption to it. I sat on a low wall at the edge of the excavation and watched them move through the site, and then I walked down to the water and stood there for a few minutes listening to the lake.

When to go: Arrive as close to opening time as possible — eight in the morning, seven on summer weekdays — before the tour buses. October to April is best for weather. The site is open every day except during certain religious festivals; check ahead during Easter and Jewish holidays.