Nea Church

Consecrated on 20 Nov 543 AD, the Nea Church (or the New Church of Mary the mother of God) was the largest church ever built in the Holy Land. At 375 ft (112.5m) long and 185ft (55.5m) wide, it was larger even than the Holy Sepulchre, and situated on a hill higher than the Temple Mount. All that remains of it today are ruins, parts of which abut and is included in the southern wall of the Old City of Jerusalem about halfway between the Zion Gate and the Dung Gate.

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Though it is clearly known that it was commissioned and paid for by Emperor Justinian (527-565), the reason for its construction remains unclear. According to Justinian's court historian Procopius the church was built to hide away the temple treasures. When the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed by Titus in 70 AD, its treasures were carried away to Rome, paraded in the triumphal procession of Emperor Vespasian and then kept away in the Temple of Peace. When the Vandals sacked Rome, they took the treasures with them to Carthage, from which they were retrieved when Count Belisarius sacked Carthage in 553 and brought the treasures back to Constantinople, the "new Rome." Procopius tells of the story that, after the triumphal procession in the city, a Jew approached the court and warned them that unless those sacred treasures were returned to the place where Solomon had kept them, disaster would befall the city, just as they did on Rome and Carthage. It was, according to Procopius, for the purpose of sequestering these sacred treasures of the temple back in Jerusalem that Justinian had the Nea Church built. Alas, nothing of the treasure has ever been found nor are there any ancient records about them in the church.

The majesty of Nea Church did not last long, for it was ransacked and looted by the Persians and their Jewish allies in 614. Though pilgrims report the church as still functioning in the 9th Cent, little of it remains today.

Though the barrel-vaulted supports for the church were already identified by Charles Warren in the late 19th Cent, serious archaeological work began only with the excavations of the Jewish Quarter by Israeli archaeologists in the 1970s, especially by Nahman Avigad and Meir Ben-Dov.