Sebastia

The road to Sebastia branches off the main Nablus-Jenin highway without any particular fanfare — a sign, a turn, and then a descent through olive groves on a road that had not been recently repaved and showed it. I arrived at the village on a Thursday afternoon when the two cafés on the main square were full with backgammon players and the ruins behind them were entirely empty. A boy of about twelve offered to show me around for ten shekels. He was an excellent guide.

Sebastia was once one of the great cities of the ancient Levant. Founded by the Israelite King Omri in the ninth century BCE as the capital of the Northern Kingdom of Israel, later expanded by the Hasmoneans, then dramatically rebuilt by Herod the Great as Sebaste in honour of Augustus — the ruins visible today are mostly Herodian and Hellenistic in period, with Israelite-era walls and palace remains beneath. A colonnade street, partially re-erected, runs along the hillside with columns that have been put back upright in various stages of completeness: some whole, some shafts without capitals, some just bases. Walking along it at late afternoon with the olive trees on either side and the village above and the valley floor below, I had the particular feeling of being inside several historical periods simultaneously and not being equipped to process any of them individually.

The boy — whose name was Ahmad and who had clearly done this tour several hundred times — led me to the Israelite palace remains and explained, in precise English he had not learned in school, that this was where King Ahab and Jezebel had lived, that Jezebel had been thrown from a window here and eaten by dogs, that this was in the Bible and he had read it. He said all of this without apparent judgment on any of the parties involved, which seemed like good historical consciousness for a twelve-year-old.

The Crusader church of St. John the Baptist — on the site traditionally identified with the tomb of John the Baptist — was converted to a mosque during the Mamluk period and has been a mosque ever since, the apse and nave of the Crusader structure still evident in the walls and the columns repurposed as the prayer hall’s central supports. The floor has been tiled over, the mihrab added facing Mecca, and the building now smells of prayer mats and old stone and the particular cool that stone buildings develop when they have been in continuous use for a thousand years. I entered and stayed for perhaps ten minutes in the dim interior, the muezzin from the minaret directly above starting up while I was inside, the sound in that enclosed space becoming something physical.

The village itself is the right size for an afternoon: a couple of streets of stone houses with grape arbours, the square with its cafés, a small museum in a Crusader-era building that is worth twenty minutes of your time for its explanatory panels and the few well-labelled artefacts. The woman who ran the museum’s small gift shop sold olive oil pressed in the village and pressed it on me with such insistence that I bought two bottles, which was the correct outcome. The oil was exceptional.

Ahmad walked me back to my car at the end and asked if I was coming back. I said I hoped so. He said most people who came once came back, which struck me as the best possible review of a place.

When to go: Spring and autumn, when the olive groves are at their most beautiful and the walking around the ruins is comfortable in the afternoon. Avoid going on a Friday when the café square is busy with local families and the ruins more crowded than usual. The site has no entrance fee and no fixed opening hours; simply arrive and walk.