Nazareth

One of the realities we — tourists or historians or interpreters — live with when we visit the Holy Land is that every sacred site is now occupied by a church, which for some of can be a place for pilgrimage and for others a spoilation. I’d rather see the primitive site, but that is not how the church has treated sacred sites. So, Nazareth — where Jesus grew up — is now a bustling city. There’s not much left to the original Nazareth. So some clever folks have built Nazareth Village, a replica designed by historians and archaeologists, of what a 1st Century Nazareth was like.

I’ve got a picture of their imagined reconstruction of threshing, plus the wine press from the 1st Century. Maybe Jesus, as a boy, pressed grapes with his feet at this very site. (And maybe not.)(The grapes were pressed to the left and the juice ran through the slot into the hole to the right.)(The third picture shows the full wine pressing area. The “slot” is top right and runs down into the hole.)