The Church of Dominus Flevit
This small church symbolically recalls Jesus weeping over the destruction of Jerusalem. The name, Dominus Flevit - "the Lord wept" - is taken from Luke XIX: 41. Built in the immediate vicinity of an older Byzantine church it includes part of the remains and some sections of mosaic from the earlier church. The church was built in 1954 to the design of Antonio Berluzzi, who has many churches dotted all over Israel. The four corner, white pinnacles resemble tear drops. The church grounds yielded quite a few interesting archæological finds: a burial cave from the middle and late bronze ages (1500-1200 BCE), which puts it slightly before the Israelite period - together with sarcophagi and ossuaries from different periods; finds from the end of the Second Temple period (up to 70 CE); tens of Hebrew inscriptions in Aramaic and Greek - also from the Second Temple period; and the remains of a Byzantine monastery from the 5th century CE. The church of Dominus Flevit is unique in that the altar faces west, towards the Temple Mount and not east, as is usually the case, in order to symbolize the scene as Jesus saw it.
To the left of the church and slightly lower down can be seen the very distinctive "onion" domes of the Russian Orthodox church of Mary Magdalene and beyond, climbing up to the eastern wall of the Temple Mount, on the other side of the Kidron Valley, can be seen the Moslem graveyard which stretches virtually the entire length of the eastern wall of the Old City.
