Akko Old City

The Crusaders took Acre in 1104, after a siege Wikipedia's account dates across four years, and Britannica records that they named it St Jean d'Acre and made it their last capital. It fell to Saladin in 1187 after Hattin and was retaken in 1191 by Richard the Lionheart and Philip Augustus during the Third Crusade. Because Jerusalem was not recovered, Akko became the capital of the second Crusader kingdom and the main gate to the Holy Land, and by the thirteenth century, with the new Montmusard quarter added to the north, the account published by the Jewish Virtual Library gives it a population of about 40,000, the largest city of the Crusader Kingdom.

It ended on 18 May 1291, when the Mamluk sultan al-Ashraf Khalil took the city. That date closes the Crusader presence in the Holy Land, and it also closes the archaeological layer: what stood was pulled down to roughly the height of the vaults, and the vaults themselves, being solid and full of debris, stayed where they were.

The revival came four and a half centuries later, under Zahir al-Umar and then Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar, who governed from 1775 to 1804. They rebuilt a port town on the same peninsula, and the choice not to dig out the medieval remains is the reason there is anything to visit. UNESCO inscribed the Old City on the World Heritage List in 2001, at the committee's twenty-fifth session, for exactly this doubling: a virtually intact Crusader town preserved under a fortified Ottoman one with its citadel, mosques, khans and baths.

The practical consequence for a visitor is that the sequence of a visit is vertical rather than chronological. A morning here goes down into the thirteenth century, up into the eighteenth, along a nineteenth-century wall walk and back into a market that is trading now.

The Knights Halls are the headquarters compound of the Order of St John, and the operator's own history dates the order's first property in Akko to 1110, when Baldwin I allowed the Hospitallers to hold buildings north of the Cathedral of the Holy Cross. When the cathedral was extended northward in 1135 and damaged some of those buildings, the order moved to the north-western corner of the city and started again. The new centre is first documented in 1149, under Queen Melisende, when the church of St John was built to its south. A pilgrim named Theodoric, visiting in 1169, described it as a structure only the Templar fortress could be compared to.

What a visitor now walks through is the ground floor, because the upper storeys were destroyed. The central court covers 1,200 square metres and has two wells: a four-metre well to the north with two shallow plastered pools beside it, and a second to the south with a deeper plastered pool built like a bathtub, which the operator reads as drinking and laundry water at one end and washing at the other. The northern hall is one space divided into six by arched walls under a barrel vault ten metres high, its outer walls 3.5 metres of hewn stone because they doubled as the city wall.

Two halls are the reason people come. The Columns Hall, probably the refectory, carries eight groin vaults on three round columns about three metres across, with capitals cut in flower garlands and fleur-de-lys; the operator describes it as one of the buildings that marks the transition from Romanesque to Gothic. The Pillars Hall next door runs to about 1,300 square metres in roughly fifteen identical bays of eight-metre vaulting on square pillars, and served as a meeting and storage hall.

The odder rooms are the ones that explain how the place worked. A three-storey building held the public toilets: a room ten metres by five under a groin vault, with four rows of eight seats draining through pipes in the walls into a collection chamber and out into a municipal conduit one metre wide and one and a half metres tall that crossed the city to the sea. The operator notes that a complete system of this kind is rare, with few parallels outside monasteries and hospitals in thirteenth and fourteenth century England and Wales. Next to it, the Sugar Bowl Hall was found stacked with hundreds of cone-shaped pottery moulds and molasses jars, the equipment of a sugar industry that made the order a great deal of money.

• Central court: 1,200 m², two wells, plastered pools drained by a canal
• Northern hall: six bays under a 10 m barrel vault, outer walls 3.5 m thick
• Columns Hall: eight groin vaults on three columns about 3 m in diameter
• Pillars Hall: about 1,300 m² in roughly 15 bays of 8 m vaulting
• Latrine block: 32 seats over a collection chamber and a municipal sewer
• Sugar Bowl Hall: sugar moulds and molasses jars found stacked in rows

The Templars held the south-western corner of the city after 1187, and cut a passage from their fortress east to the port, crossing the Pisan quarter on the way. Its lower half is carved into the natural rock and its upper half is built of hewn stones closed with a semi-barrel vault. It was forgotten for seven centuries.

It came back in 1994, and the discovery is not a story of excavation. BibleWalks records that a woman living above the tunnel complained about blocked sewage, and the search for the blockage found the passage. The Akko Development Company and the Antiquities Authority cleared it out; the western section opened to the public in August 1999, and after eight more years of work on the eastern section the whole length was opened in 2007.

How long it is depends on who is asked, and the gap is large enough to be worth stating. The Old Akko operator's own page gives the tunnel as about 150 metres, twice, on the page it publishes about the site. BibleWalks gives 350 metres. Nothing consulted here reconciles the two, and the likeliest explanation is that one figure counts the section a visitor walks and the other the full run from fortress to port, but that is a guess rather than a finding.

The Templar fortress at the western end is gone. What survives of it is a description, quoted by the operator from a Templar who was in Akko during the siege of 1291: an entrance protected by two towers with walls 28 feet thick, two smaller towers beside them, and a gilded lion on top of each.

The town at street level is an eighteenth and nineteenth century one. Wikipedia's account of Acre puts the present walls between 1750 and 1814: Zahir al-Umar built the first circuit in 1750 and 1751, Jazzar Pasha reinforced it between 1775 and 1779, and further work ran on until 1814. The operator's own page for the Ethnographic Museum tells it differently, saying the walls were initially built by al-Jazzar after Napoleon's attempt on the city in 1799. Both cannot be right about the beginning, and a visitor standing on the rampart is looking at masonry that accumulated across at least two of those campaigns.

Napoleon is the reason the fortifications got the money they did. Britannica records that al-Jazzar's garrison withstood the siege of 1799; Wikipedia dates it to March and May and says Napoleon was repulsed after two months. Under al-Jazzar the town became, on Wikipedia's figures, the third largest city in Ottoman Syria with some twenty thousand inhabitants, and the buildings that give the skyline its shape date from those decades: the el-Jazzar Mosque of 1781, built partly from marble and granite robbed out of Caesarea, Atlit and medieval Acre, and Khan al-Umdan by the port, built in 1785.

Two of the ticketed sites are Ottoman rather than Crusader. Hammam al-Basha was built by al-Jazzar at the end of the eighteenth century and originally called the New Hammam; it ran as a working bath house for about 150 years, and the visit now is a multimedia piece called The Story of the Last Bath Attendant, walked through the dressing room, four intermediate rooms and the hot room. The Ethnographic Museum, Treasures in the Wall, is installed inside the arched halls of the Burj al-Commander in the north-eastern wall, rooms that once quartered the Ottoman garrison.

The citadel that al-Jazzar raised over the Crusader compound had a long afterlife of its own. It became the main prison for northern Palestine under the British Mandate, and on 4 May 1947 the Irgun broke into it and freed underground prisoners. The Ministry of Defence museum that tells that story sits directly above the Hospitaller halls, and it is not part of the ₪55 ticket.

Work on the compound has run in two long campaigns. Parts were uncovered in the 1950s and 1960s, and the operator credits the excavation of the Columns Hall specifically to the Nature and Parks Authority in the 1960s. The second campaign was forced rather than chosen: in the early 1990s cracks opened in the vaults of the Pillars Hall and material began falling into the space below. State funding followed in 1993, and the Israel Antiquities Authority excavated from 1992 to 1999, financed by the Ministry of Tourism, with the Old Acre Development Company running the conservation.

The operator is unusually direct about method. It describes an approach ranging from minimal conservation to full reconstruction, using both original Crusader technique and modern materials, naming fibreglass pins and reinforced concrete structures among them. On the Pillars Hall it says the main section of the cruciform vaulting is preserved in its original Crusader form while the ceilings at the northern and southern ends collapsed and have been restored. That is the honest reading of the whole site: the plan, the walls and most of the vaulting are thirteenth-century, and the parts that fell in have been rebuilt with visible modern help.

The compound is also not finished. The western wing has never been excavated, though Gothic capitals recovered from a collapse there, some carved with human figures, suggest it was the living quarters and stood at least two storeys. The Hospitaller hospital south of St John's Church is likewise unexcavated, and the church itself is now a municipal community centre inside an Ottoman saraya building.

Even the size of the place is unsettled. The conservation project page gives the Hospitaller compound as about 8,300 square metres; the site page says about 5,000 square metres has been excavated to date; the Jewish Virtual Library's archaeological account gives the headquarters as roughly 4,500 square metres with a 1,200 square metre courtyard. The figures are measuring different things, and none of the three pages says which.