Garden of Gethsemane

The Garden of Gethsemane sits at the foot of the Mount of Olives, across the Kidron Valley from the Old City walls, and is where the Gospels place Jesus’s prayer and arrest on the night before the crucifixion. The name comes from the Aramaic gat shemanim — oil press — which is what the site was: a working olive grove with a press, on the slope where Jerusalem’s olives were pressed.

The garden today is small, walled, and immediately beside the Church of All Nations. Eight ancient olive trees stand in it. Root systems from several have been radiocarbon dated to the twelfth century, making them among the oldest known living olive trees, and DNA testing has shown they share a single parent plant. They are cuttings from one older tree.

Are these the actual trees?

Not the same trunks, and this is worth being precise about because it is asked constantly.

Josephus records that Titus’s forces cut down every tree around Jerusalem during the siege of 70 CE. Whatever stood here then did not survive it. What the dating and DNA work does establish is that the present trees are old, that they descend from a single ancestor, and that olives regenerate from their own root systems. A trunk can die and the root send up a new one.

So the honest description is continuity rather than identity: not the same trees, plausibly the same roots, certainly the same grove.

What is the Church of All Nations?

The basilica beside the garden, completed in 1924 to a design by Antonio Barluzzi and funded by twelve countries, which is where the name comes from. Their coats of arms are set into the ceiling domes.

It is built over the exposed bedrock at the front of the altar, traditionally identified as the rock where Jesus prayed. That rock is the reason the building exists and the reason it is shaped the way it is.

The interior is deliberately dark. Barluzzi glazed it in violet alabaster so the church holds a permanent dusk, whatever the hour outside. Visitors walking in from the Jerusalem glare often stop in the doorway. It is the most effective piece of architectural intent in the city, and it is doing one job: this is a place remembered for a night.

The church stands on foundations of two earlier buildings: a fourth-century Byzantine basilica destroyed by earthquake, and a twelfth-century Crusader chapel. Sections of the Byzantine mosaic floor are visible under glass.

What else is on the site?

• The Grotto of Gethsemane, a cave a short walk north, traditionally where the disciples waited and slept. It was a working olive press in antiquity, which makes it the most literal surviving link to the name.
• The Tomb of the Virgin Mary, reached down a broad Crusader stairway into a cool underground church: one of the few genuinely cold places in Jerusalem in August.
• The Church of Mary Magdalene, the Russian Orthodox church with seven gold onion domes on the slope above, built in 1888. Open only limited hours.

When should you go?

Early morning. The garden faces west toward the Old City, so morning light falls on the walls opposite and the site is quiet before the coaches arrive. By mid-morning in high season the church is full and the atmosphere Barluzzi engineered is harder to feel.

Holy Week fills it completely. If that is the point of your trip, go anyway and accept the crowds; if it is not, November and early spring are far better.

Modest dress is required. Entry to the church and garden is free. You cannot walk among the ancient trees — they are railed off — but you can see them clearly from the path.

How long does it take?

Thirty to forty-five minutes for the garden and church together; an hour and a half if you add the Tomb of the Virgin and the grotto.

It sits naturally at the bottom of a Mount of Olives descent. Start at the summit viewpoint, walk down past Dominus Flevit, and arrive here at the foot of the hill. From Gethsemane the Lions’ Gate is a few minutes’ walk uphill, which puts you inside the Old City for the afternoon.

That route is how the Abrahamic Religions day is usually built, and it is the order that makes geographic sense of the accounts: the ridge, the descent, the valley floor, then the city gate.