Sacred To

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Israel gathers six cities that between them carry the most contested and most shared holy ground of three religions, from a Bronze Age hill fought over for three thousand years to a nineteenth century prison city that became the world center of a fourth.

Jerusalem sits at the center: holy to Judaism, Christianity and Islam alike, setting of the First and Second Temples, the death and resurrection of Jesus and Muhammad's Night Journey, its Old City still divided into four adjoining quarters, Jewish, Christian, Muslim and Armenian, each home to a living community. Nazareth carries the gospel account of Jesus's upbringing, its Basilica of the Annunciation standing over a cave venerated as Mary's house while a separate Greek Orthodox church marks the same event at a different spot, and it is today the largest Arab city in Israel.

Caesarea Maritima, Herod's harbour capital of Roman Judea, was where the prefect Pontius Pilate's name turned up on an inscription in 1961 and where Acts places the conversion of the centurion Cornelius, the moment the text treats as the church's opening to gentiles. Yavneh answers Jerusalem's loss: after the Temple fell in 70 CE, Yohanan ben Zakkai's school there moved Temple rites into the synagogue and the home, making rabbinic Judaism survivable without a sanctuary.

Acre and Haifa together form the administrative heart of the Bahai Faith: Bahaullah was exiled to Acre in 1868 and is enshrined at nearby Bahji, the point Bahais face in prayer, while Haifa's Shrine of the Bab and Universal House of Justice sit terraced up Mount Carmel, a mountain that already carried Elijah's contest against the prophets of Baal.

From a Bronze Age hill to a nineteenth century prison city, the six show one small country holding four religions' centers at once.