Stella Maris Carmelite Monastery

Mount Carmel stops abruptly at the Mediterranean, and Stella Maris sits on the last of it, on the headland above Bat Galim with the bay and the port cranes laid out to the east. The order describes the monastery as its mother house and the spiritual centre for the entire Order of Discalced Carmelites, which is a heavier claim than the building suggests: from the road it reads as a plain square block with a dome, the arms of the order over the door, and small barred windows low down.

That defensive look is deliberate and it is documented. The friars building the present church were assaulted by neighbours and had to defend the property and the people staying in it, so the ground floor went up with thick walls and few and small openings behind bars. The 1908 Catholic Encyclopedia called the result a large square block strong enough to afford protection against hostile attempts, with the church at its centre and no direct entrance from outside.

Stella Maris is Latin for Star of the Sea, a title of the Virgin Mary. The sequence here runs the other way round from most religious houses: the order was founded on this ridge and exported, not founded elsewhere and planted. For most of the twentieth century the complex was not the friars' to run, having been occupied by the army, first British and then Israeli. The lighthouse across the road, which the Carmelites themselves built, is still a military installation and not a visitor attraction. Below the monastery the Bat Galim cable car, opened in 1986 and 355 m long, climbs from the seafront promenade to the slope opposite.

In the twelfth century, under the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, hermits settled in the caves of Mount Carmel in imitation of Elijah. Sometime between 1206 and 1214 their prior, known in the rule only by the initial of his first name, asked Albert Avogadro, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, for a written rule of life, and got one. That request is the founding act of the Carmelite order. When Acre fell in 1291 the friars left, and stayed away for roughly two and a half centuries.

The return was negotiated rather than improvised. The Catholic Encyclopedia records a contract signed at Caiffa on 29 November 1631, after Prosper of the Holy Spirit had repeatedly visited the mountain on his journeys to and from India. Onuphrius of St James, a Belgian, and two companions reached Alexandretta on 5 November 1633 and took possession early the following year. For decades they lived in caverns cut in the rock, and were installed in a proper convent only on 14 December 1720, whereupon it was plundered within days and the fathers bound hand and foot. Prosper had died in his own grotto near the lighthouse in 1653, and that site is still Carmelite property.

In 1761 Daher al-Umar, by then the effective ruler of Galilee, ordered the friars off the promontory and had the convent demolished. They moved to the present position, directly above the grotto, clearing the ruins of a medieval Greek church known as the Abbey of St Margaret and of a chapel thought to be Byzantine. The French account dates that third monastery to 1767-1774.

It lasted a generation. The building was wrecked in the fallout from Napoleon's 1799 campaign, and in 1821 Abdullah Pasha of Acre had what remained destroyed outright, so his enemies could not fortify it while he moved on Jerusalem. Its masonry went into his summer palace and a lighthouse, both sold back to the Carmelites in 1846.

• c. 1206-1214: the hermits' rule from Albert Avogadro, and the order's beginning here
• 1631-1761: the convent on the promontory, demolished on Daher al-Umar's order
• 1767-1799: the third monastery above the grotto, wrecked after Napoleon's campaign
• 1827 or 1836 onwards: the fourth building, the one open today

Napoleon besieged Acre from 20 March to 21 May 1799 and failed to take it. During the campaign the monastery served as his field hospital, and when the army withdrew the sick and wounded who could not travel were left in it. They were killed and the friars driven out. How many were abandoned here is not settled: the French-language account puts it at about two thousand, a round figure that should be treated with suspicion.

What happened next is unusually well recorded for a small site. In 1804 Father Jules du Saint-Sauveur came back to take possession and found the floor strewn with bones. He gathered them into caves and walled up the entrances; the walls fell in and animals scattered them again. In the 1830s Brother Mathieu collected what was left and buried it under a pyramid at the church entrance.

The pyramid is still there, immediately in front of the church door, and most visitors walk straight past it. Its inscription is 2 Samuel 1:25, King David's lament over Saul and Jonathan: How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle.

On the far side of the road, in front of the lighthouse, a pillar carries a statue of the Immaculate Conception, erected by the people of Chile to honour the patroness of their nation.

The present church and monastery were the work of an Italian Discalced Carmelite lay brother whose name changes depending on which source you open. The order's own history page calls him Giovanni Battista Cassini and an expert architect; the 1908 Catholic Encyclopedia calls him John Baptist of the Blessed Sacrament, 1777 to 1849. He financed the work by collecting alms across Europe, and French royal backing mattered: an intervention by Charles X in 1825 obtained the sultan's permission to rebuild.

The dates do not line up, and it is worth knowing that before reading any guidebook on the subject. The Catholic Encyclopedia says the foundation stone was laid in 1827 and that, the work being on a larger scale than before, it was finished only by his successor, Brother Charles, in 1853. The French-language account has the rebuilding running 1827 to 1836, the church dedicated on 12 June 1836 while still unfinished, and community life beginning in 1846. The order's own page prints the 1846 return of the property and an 1836 start of works in consecutive sentences.

One date every source agrees on: three years after 1836, Pope Gregory XVI granted the church the title of minor basilica, and the sanctuary took the name Stella Maris. Treating 1836 as the year of the building and 1827 as the year of the stone is the safest way to hold it.

The property came back in pieces. In 1841 the Carmelites opened negotiations to buy back Abdullah Pasha's palace, built a few metres away out of their own quarried church, and after five years the sale went through. The palace became a hospice for pilgrims, a function the monastery still performs: part of the complex is now a Pilgrim Center with 47 rooms, taking groups of up to 95.

• Foundation stone 1827, completed 1853 by Brother Charles: Catholic Encyclopedia, 1908
• Rebuilt 1827-1836, dedicated 12 June 1836, community life from 1846: French Wikipedia
• Opened 1836: English Wikipedia
• Works started 1836, property returned 1846: the Discalced Carmelites' own history page

The church is built on a cross plan and its interior walls are faced in white marble panels. The order's own description makes the point that they are so bright and so well placed that visitors sometimes think the walls have been painted, which is fair warning: on a sunny morning the nave reads as a flat white surface until you are close enough to see the joints.

The dome is the thing people come inside for. It was decorated by the Maltese Carmelite Luigi Poggi between 1924 and 1928, and its scenes come from both testaments: Elijah carried up to heaven in the chariot of fire, the most legible of them, David with his harp, Isaiah, the Holy Family, and the four evangelists, with Latin verses running round the drum.

At the centre of the main altar stands a statue of the Virgin holding the child and the scapular, on a pedestal carved from a cedar of Lebanon, venerated locally as Our Lady of Mount Carmel. On the pilaster strips are four embossments for Carmelite saints: Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Edith Stein and Mariam Bouardy.

The room to the right of the entryway is easy to miss and worth two minutes: a permanent nativity scene and artefacts from the Byzantine church that once stood here. The Franciscan archaeologist Bellarmino Bagatti, who dug at Nazareth and Dominus Flevit, excavated at Stella Maris in 1960 and 1961. The souvenir shop is entered from outside, not through the church.

The altar stands on a raised platform, and a few steps down from the nave is the grotto the whole building exists to cover. It is small: an altar carved in the rock with a statue of Elijah above it, and candles burning for Carmelite communities in other countries. The tradition is that Elijah lived here for a time, and the grotto is also called the cave of the sons of the prophets.

It is not the Cave of Elijah, and confusing the two is the commonest mistake made about this site. That is a separate and larger grotto lower down the western slope, off Allenby Road, known in Arabic as el-Khader, venerated by Jews, Christians, Muslims and Druze, many Druze identifying Elijah with al-Khidr, the green prophet of water and life. It now functions as a synagogue, divided by a velvet curtain into a men's section and a women's section.

The separation has a history. When the Carmelites returned in the 1630s the lower cave was already in use by Mamluk ascetics venerating Elijah there, and after a series of incidents the friars moved to a different grotto nearby. Pilgrim testimony about a cave of Elijah on Carmel is older than either claim: Ioannes Phokas described one at the seaward end of the ridge in 1185, and Richard Pococke noted in 1738 that it was venerated by Christians, Jews and Muslims alike.

The monastery's great annual event dates from the First World War, when the statue of Our Lady of the Scapular was removed for safekeeping elsewhere in Haifa and carried back in a small procession in 1919. Every year since, on the first Sunday after Easter, the statue is walked between downtown Haifa and Stella Maris up the western slope, led by the Latin Patriarch. Wikipedia's account calls it the Holy Land's second largest Catholic procession after Palm Sunday in Jerusalem, a ranking nobody appears to have measured.