Kursi

Kursi had been out of the record for something over a thousand years. Arab settlers used the ruined church as houses and storerooms in the ninth century, according to the parks authority's brochure, and after that the place stopped functioning as a Christian pilgrimage site altogether. The pilgrim reference site See the Holy Land describes the rediscovery in 1970 as a matter of Byzantine pottery noticed in the trail of a bulldozer building a new road to the Golan Heights.

The dig that followed ran from 1971 to 1974 and was led by Dan Urman together with Vassilios Tzaferis, working for the state antiquities body. Tzaferis was born on Samos in 1936, renounced his Greek citizenship in 1964 to stay in Israel, and went on to be deputy director and then director of the Israel Antiquities Authority's Division for Surveys and Excavations before retiring in 2001. He died on 1 January 2015. Kursi is one of the excavations his obituaries list alongside Beth She'an, Tel Dan and Capernaum.

Work has continued in bursts since. A separate excavation in 1980 dug around a prominent boulder on the slope east of the church and found a small chapel beside it. Between 2011 and 2013 a bathhouse came out of the ground north of the church. The most consequential recent find is not inside the park at all, and is dealt with at the end of this page.

The monastery sat inside a rectangular stone wall of 145 by 123 metres. The gate faced the lake and had a watchtower beside it; a paved road ran down from the shore to the gate, and from the gate a paved street led to the church. A pilgrim arriving by boat therefore walked uphill through a controlled sequence, with the bathhouse on the northern side of the entrance before the church at the centre.

The church is a basilica of about 23 by 45 metres, divided by two rows of six columns each into a nave and two aisles. The stone columns carried Corinthian marble capitals cut with crosses. Beneath the position of the altar the excavators found a small stone box for relics. There is a single apse with rooms on either side of it; a room on the northern side holds an oil press, which the parks authority reconstructed along with the lower church.

The southern room off the apse was the baptistery, used for baptising infants, and its threshold carries the mosaic inscription that dates the floor to the year 585, in the reign of the emperor Maurice. The parks authority's brochure puts the construction of the baptistery at the end of the sixth century, which fits. A staircase from the southern end of the narthex, closed to visitors, drops to a burial crypt: the parks authority reports the remains of 30 men there, probably the monastery's own priests.

Smaller things are worth finding. The atrium is largely built over a large cistern and the two well heads give it away. Along the northern stretch of the enclosure wall the excavators exposed dwellings, courtyards and drainage channels, the domestic half of a complex that housed not only monks but, on the parks authority's reading of the evidence, a Christian community that kept itself apart from the Jewish settlement on the shore nearby.

• Original: the mosaic floors, the column bases and capitals, the oil press, the crypt, the cistern and the wall footings
• Reconstructed: the lower church and its oil press, and the enclosure walls, cleared of rubble and rebuilt
• Closed to visitors: the stair down to the burial crypt, and the ladder into the cistern under the atrium
• Outside the fence: the harbour breakwater and the possible synagogue at Kursi Beach

The nave floor is geometric. The interest is in the aisles, where the mosaic ran to medallions of local plants and animals, and where somebody later went along the floor removing the living creatures. Cockerels, geese, doves, cormorants and several kinds of fish are listed among the original subjects. Some survive well enough to be identified. Many do not, because the figures were deliberately picked out.

The plants came off better, and that asymmetry is the point: citrons, figs, pomegranates, dates and bunches of grapes are still legible where the birds beside them are not. One panel shows a basket set between a pair of doves. The parks authority notes the dove's Christian associations, the Holy Spirit and the purity of Mary among them.

Who defaced the floor, and when, is not settled. The parks authority's brochure attributes it to the ninth-century Arab settlers who were living in the ruins, and calls them probably responsible. See the Holy Land instead places the obliteration at the abandonment of the monastery in the early eighth century. The evidence on the floor shows only the selectivity, not the hand.

One absence is conspicuous. Nothing in the mosaics depicts the miracle of the swine, and the parks authority's Hebrew page says there is not even a hint of one, while allowing that such a panel may have existed and been destroyed, or may simply not have been found yet. A site built to commemorate an event did not, so far as anyone can now see, put the event on its floor.

Christian tradition does not localise the miracle in the church. It localises it on the slope above, at a large boulder east of the compound, and that is where the 1980 excavation went. It found a small chapel wedged between the hillside and the rock, its apse built into a cave, along with remains of what may have been a tower raised around the boulder itself.

Three distinct layers of mosaic floor were excavated under the chapel, which means the spot was refloored twice and mattered for a long time. See the Holy Land reports crosses in the earliest of those floors and takes them as evidence that it was laid before 427, when crosses on church pavements were prohibited. That would make the rock older as a venerated place than the monastery below it.

The parks authority calls it simply the Holy Rock, and links the cave to the place where the possessed man is said to have come out to meet Jesus. The chapel is on rough ground above the excavated compound and is a short climb from the level part of the site.

The episode Kursi commemorates is told three times, in Mark 5, Matthew 8 and Luke 8, and the three accounts do not agree with each other. The country is that of the Gerasenes in Mark, the Gadarenes in Matthew and the Gergesenes in Luke, with further variation between ancient manuscripts of the same gospel. Mark and Luke have one possessed man; Matthew has two.

The parks authority's brochure identifies the site with Gergessa or Gerasa, quoting the phrase about the country of the Gadarenes which is over against Galilee, and adds that archaeologists identify the place as the ancient Kursi named in the Talmud as a centre of idol worship. The modern name of the site is therefore the Talmudic one, not the Gospel one.

None of this settles where the event was believed to happen in the first century, only where it was being commemorated by the fifth. A Byzantine monastery of this size on this shore is strong evidence for a well established local tradition. It is not evidence for a location.

In November and December 2015 an excavation at Kursi Beach, about a kilometre north-west of the national park, opened the south-western corner of a public building on the lake shore that its excavators thought might be a synagogue. It had a raised platform of roughly two square metres, aligned east to west, built with limestone slabs reused from an arch. The dig was directed by Haim Cohen with Michal Artzy and reported in the Israel Antiquities Authority's excavation journal under permit G-88/2015.

Inside the building lay a marble slab, broken but largely recoverable, measuring 1.25 metres by 0.7 and 8 centimetres thick, carrying eight lines of Hebrew and Aramaic. The text opens with a phrase meaning to be remembered in good memory and closes with amen. The excavators recorded it as the first of its kind found in Israel. Haggai Misgav of the Hebrew University, quoted by the Times of Israel, read it as a standard dedicatory synagogue inscription and compared the letter forms to the Trumpeting Place inscription from the Temple Mount.

Pottery and coins from the building run from the Byzantine period into the early Abbasid, in the seventh and eighth centuries, and the excavators concluded that Kursi was part of a Jewish settlement through the Byzantine, Umayyad and early Abbasid periods. A Christian pilgrimage monastery and a Jewish village were sharing this stretch of shore. In Area A the same project recorded a harbour breakwater standing about 2.5 metres high, its large basalt blocks laid diagonally on the seaward face and vertically on the inner one.

An earlier survey off the same beach is worth knowing about for a different reason. In the autumn of 2000 Ehud Galili and colleagues found the foundations of a small building, 2.5 metres square, lying at 213.5 to 214.1 metres below sea level. Radiocarbon on wood and grain in its mortar gave a calibrated date of 530 to 660, and the plaster showed it had been built on dry land, which means the lake had at some point fallen to 215 metres below sea level or lower. None of these three sites is inside the ticketed park, and there is nothing built for visitors at any of them.