Via Dolorosa

The walk begins in the Muslim Quarter at the courtyard of the Umariyeh school, on the site traditionally identified with the Antonia Fortress, and ends in the Christian Quarter inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Published lengths differ: the English Wikipedia entry gives about 600 metres, See the Holy Land gives about 500 metres, and neither is unreasonable because the route has no fixed kerb line and walkers cut corners differently. On the ground it is ten minutes of walking and considerably more than that of stopping.

The first nine stations are outdoors. Station I is the school courtyard, which is not always open. Station II is the Franciscan complex opposite it, holding the Church of the Flagellation and the Chapel of the Condemnation, with the Ecce Homo arch spanning the lane just beyond. Stations III and IV stand a short way down Al-Wad Road at Armenian Catholic chapels, station V at the corner where the route turns uphill and Simon of Cyrene is said to have taken the cross, station VI at the Greek Catholic Church of St Veronica, station VII at the junction with Souq Khan al-Zeit, station VIII by a Greek Orthodox monastery and station IX at the entrance to the Coptic Orthodox patriarchate, above the Holy Sepulchre.

Stations X to XIV are all inside the church. Station X, where Jesus is stripped, is at the Chapel of the Franks; XI, the nailing to the cross, and XII, the death, are the Catholic and Greek chapels on the rock of Calvary; XIII is the Catholic altar of Our Lady of Sorrows; and XIV is the tomb itself, in the edicule under the rotunda.

The markers themselves are modest and easy to miss: Roman numerals set into walls above head height, with bronze sculptures added at the stations in 2019 showing what each one commemorates. There are no barriers, no route signs and no ticket booths. Several of the stations sit in the middle of a busy retail street, and the ninth is reached by leaving the souk and climbing.

• Stations I to IX: outdoors, from the Umariyeh school through Al-Wad Road and Souq Khan al-Zeit
• Stations X to XIV: indoors, in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, from the Chapel of the Franks to the edicule
• Markers: Roman numerals on the walls, with bronze sculptures added in 2019
• Direction: walked from Lions' Gate towards the church, the reverse of how the Franciscans first walked it

Pilgrims were walking to Calvary long before anyone counted stations. Byzantine accounts of the fourth and fifth centuries describe processions setting out from the Mount of Olives and entering the city through what is now Lions' Gate, with no designated stops along the way. By the eighth century the procession had moved west, taking in Mount Zion and Hagia Sophia, where the praetorium was then believed to have stood, and after the East and West split there were competing routes, each favouring the churches its own communion controlled. In the Crusader period the street on the present line was called Jehoshaphat Street.

The Franciscans arrived with a formal mandate. Their province of the Holy Land dates to 1217, and Pope Clement VI's bull Nuper Carissimae established the Custody. From about 1350 the friars ran an official circuit for pilgrims, and it ran the wrong way round: out from the Holy Sepulchre to Pilate's house, rather than following the events in order. Around 1517 they reversed it, and it has been walked in narrative order ever since.

The counting happened elsewhere. Europeans who could not travel to Jerusalem built copies of the route at home, with anything from seven to thirty stops; the fourteen-station version is usually traced to the Way of the Cross at Leuven in 1505. Pope Innocent XI allowed the Franciscans to erect stations in their own churches in 1686, and in 1731 Pope Clement XII extended the right to all churches and fixed the number at fourteen. Britannica's account of what followed is blunt: in the eighteenth century the Franciscans bowed to Western devotional feeling and provided fourteen stations in Jerusalem to match.

That is why the present route dates to the eighteenth century rather than to antiquity, and why some individual stations were only put where they now stand in the nineteenth. Stations I, IV, V and VIII in particular were settled that late. Five of the fourteen, including the three falls, the meeting with his mother and Veronica wiping his face, are not recorded in the New Testament at all.

The oldest visible thing on the route is not first-century. The arch that crosses the lane beyond the second station, long called the Ecce Homo arch after Pilate's words, was built by Hadrian as the triple-arched gateway to the eastern of the two forums of Aelia Capitolina, the colony founded on the ruins of Jerusalem after 130 CE. It postdates the events it is named for by roughly a century.

The same applies to the most famous pavement in the city. Beneath the convent of the Sisters of Zion, next to that arch, lies the Struthion Pool, an open-air rock-cut cistern built by Herod the Great in the first century BCE and measuring 52 by 14 metres. It was later covered by two barrel vaults carrying a flagstone pavement, and that pavement was shown for generations as the Lithostrotos, the stone pavement of John's gospel where Jesus was condemned. The French Dominican archaeologist Pierre Benoit reexamined it and dated the vaults and the flagstones to the second century CE, contemporary with the Ecce Homo arch. The stones are Roman. They are not the stones of the trial.

The buildings at the stations are mostly modern. The complex at the second station has Crusader origins but was neglected for centuries under Ottoman rule; Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt gave it to the Franciscans in 1838, a hasty reconstruction followed in 1839 with money from Duke Maximilian Joseph in Bavaria, and the church standing there now was built between 1928 and 1929 by the Italian architect Antonio Barluzzi, working deliberately in a twelfth-century manner. Its dome is shaped as a crown of thorns. Most of the other station chapels are nineteenth or twentieth century foundations of the various communities.

At the end of the route the building is genuinely old. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre was built by Constantine around 326 CE and consecrated in 335, destroyed by the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim in 1009, rebuilt by 1048 and substantially remade by the Crusaders in the twelfth century, which is the layout a visitor walks through today. Its interior arrangements are frozen by the Status Quo of 1852, which divides rights among six communities and requires their consensus for any change.

• Hadrianic, about 130 CE: the Ecce Homo arch, the vaults over the Struthion Pool and the flagstones above them
• Herodian, first century BCE: the Struthion Pool itself, cut as an open cistern
• Crusader, twelfth century: the fabric of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at stations X to XIV
• Nineteenth and twentieth century: most of the station chapels, and the Church of the Flagellation of 1928 to 1929
• 2019: the bronze sculptures now marking the stations

The whole route hangs on one unresolved question: where the praetorium was, meaning where the Roman governor heard the case. The traditional answer, and the reason the walk starts where it does, is the Antonia Fortress, the citadel Herod the Great built at the north-west corner of the Temple Mount and named for Mark Antony. The argument for it is practical: a prefect would want to be beside the Temple during the pilgrim festivals, when trouble was likeliest.

The argument against it is also strong. Philo and Josephus indicate that Roman governors stayed at Herod's palace on the western hill, near the present Jaffa Gate, and that palace was rediscovered beneath the citadel there in 2001. In 2009 the archaeologist Shimon Gibson identified a paved courtyard with a raised platform on the site, which matches the gospel description of the judgment seat. On that reading the real route would have begun at the other end of the Old City altogether. A third suggestion places the praetorium at the Hasmonean palace, roughly between the two.

Archaeology has not helped the traditional site. Pierre Benoit found no support for the four-towered Antonia of the standard reconstructions, and the surviving remains suggest a footprint of about 112 by 40 metres. More awkward still, the ground at the first two stations was occupied in Jesus's lifetime by a large open-air pool, which is a poor place to hold a trial, and the pavement above it was not laid until Hadrian rebuilt the area.

Scholars have not settled this and are unlikely to. What the Via Dolorosa preserves is a route hallowed by centuries of walking rather than one demonstrated by excavation, and the Franciscans who lead it say as much.

The route is free and open at any hour because it is a street. What is not always open is everything on it. The first station is a school courtyard entered with the caretaker's permission, published as Monday to Thursday and Saturday from 14:30 to 18:00 and Friday from 14:30 to 16:00, which means most morning walkers find it shut. The Church of the Flagellation at the second station is listed by the Custody's Christian Information Centre as 07:00 to 18:00 in summer and to 17:00 in winter, though other published accounts give a long midday closure, and the Ecce Homo basilica with the Lithostrotos is listed as 08:00 to 17:00.

The one fixed event is the procession. Franciscan friars lead a Via Crucis along the whole route every Friday, starting from the Omariyeh school opposite the Flagellation monastery at 16:00 in summer and 15:00 in winter, escorted by kawas in Ottoman uniform. It is the busiest the lanes get and the one time the route is walked as a body rather than in ones and twos.

The last five stations depend on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre being open, and it keeps its own hours: the Christian Information Centre publishes 05:00 to 20:45 in summer, closing at 20:00 in October, and 04:00 to 19:00 in winter, closing at 19:30 in March. Entry is free. Arriving at the ninth station after the church has shut leaves the walk five stations short.

Two paid stops sit directly on the route and are worth knowing about. The Terra Sancta Museum in the Flagellation monastery charges ₪15 for an adult and ₪10 reduced for one section, or ₪20 for a combined ticket, and its multimedia presentation runs about fifteen minutes in ten languages. The Church of St Alexander Nevsky beside the Holy Sepulchre, where Russian excavations exposed part of the Roman city, charges ₪5.