Holy Land

Holy Land is not a border and never has been. It is the name three religions use for the same stretch of country, and the atlas holds it separately because the term belongs to devotion and travel rather than to any state.

For Judaism it is the land of the covenant, whose produce and boundaries carry legal consequences that apply nowhere else: agricultural tithes, the sabbatical year and other commandments are tied to it, so the definition of its extent is a matter of religious law rather than of sentiment. For Christianity it is the setting of the gospels, and it became a destination once Constantine's mother Helena travelled there in the fourth century and churches were built over the sites identified with the nativity, the crucifixion and the resurrection. For Islam it is the land of the prophets, and Jerusalem holds the Farthest Mosque named in the night journey; the region's earlier prophets are Islam's prophets too.

Pilgrimage is what the name mostly describes. Medieval European pilgrims travelled in organised parties with guidebooks and indulgences attached to specific sites; the crusades were preached as an armed extension of that traffic; and Muslim and Jewish pilgrimage ran alongside on their own circuits. Modern religious tourism, in the millions annually, follows routes that are recognisably the same ones, to sites whose identification often dates from the fourth century rather than the first.

The Holy Land's most instructive religious institution is an administrative arrangement nobody designed and everybody now defends.

The status quo is a set of rules governing who may do what, when and where, at the shared Christian sites, above all the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and the Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem. It was consolidated by Ottoman decrees in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries after repeated violent disputes between communities, and it fixes the existing distribution of rights in place: which denomination owns which chapel, which may process at which hour, which is responsible for cleaning which step. Greek Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic and Roman Catholic custodians hold the largest shares, with Coptic, Syriac and Ethiopian communities holding smaller ones.

Because any repair to a shared space could be read as a claim to it, maintenance is difficult. A wooden ladder has stood on a ledge above the Holy Sepulchre's entrance since at least the eighteenth century because moving it would require agreement. The keys to the church have been held by two Muslim families for generations, an arrangement that persists because it removes one point of contention.

The arrangement is regularly described as absurd and is a serious piece of conflict management. It has kept a functioning shared use of the most contested Christian building in the world for two centuries, on the principle that possession is frozen and nothing is renegotiated.