Sights

The prominent, yellow-brick Greek Orthodox Church of St. George stands in the center of town, right off the town square. Inside, parts of the 6th-cen-tury Map of Palestine, originally composed of 2.3 million tiles, remain intact. The map includes the Palestinian cities of Byzantium, most notably Nablus, Hebron, and Jericho. At one time the map depicted the entire Middle East, as shown by the few remaining tiles of Turkey, Lebanon, and Egypt. A map of Jerusalem, with representations of the buildings existing in the 6th century, including the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, is the most interesting and renowned section.

The church is best known by some devout and imaginative local Christians and Muslims for hosting the Virgin Mary in 1980. A small shrine in the crypt pictures Mary as she purportedly appeared, with a third arm and blue “healing hand,” which were supernaturally imprinted on the icon during the Madonna’s visit. (Open Mon.-Thurs. and Sat- 7am-lpm and 3-6pm or 7pm, Fri. and Sun. after 1 lam; ask around for the caretaker. Free, but a donation box requests money for the poor.)

Madaba’s ramshackle museum features an extensive collection of mosaics, including a well-preserved depiction of the Garden of Eden, traditional dresses representative of the different regions in Jordan, and jewelry and pottery dating back to various ages. Divided into three sections—the Old House of Madaba, a Folklore Museum, and an Archeological Museum—the museum sits in the southern part of town. Ask for directions at the tourist office. (Open Wed.-Mon. 9am-lpm and 2-5pm, Fri. and holidays lOam-lpm and 2-4pm. Admission 25Ofils.) The Apostles’ Church on the left, at the second right uphill from the museum, houses the town’s largest intact mosaic.

Use Freud or Monty Python to figure out the mosaic’s symbolism, a woman surrounded by mythical sea creatures in the center of a field of parrots. Ex-parrots, that is. The church, built in 578 AD, is gone, an ex-church, but the mosaics are perfectly preserved under a modern hangar. Ask the guardian to spray water on the stones to make them glimmer. The Apostles’ Church was closed for renovations during trie summer of 1993.

The ongoing excavations have spawned two up-and-coming sights. In an effort to develop Madaba into a tourist attraction, the Ministry of Tourism is renovating age-old buildings to house a mosaic school. The school, the only one of its kind in the Middle East, is to train technicians to repair and restore mosaics and is expected to be in full operation by the summer of 1994. Meanwhile, excavations by joint Jordanian and Italian archeologists have uncovered a Roman street of columns crossing Madaba’s main street underground. The site is not expected to open to tourists for another 2-3 years, but anyone is welcome to stop by and marvel at the treasures of past empires emerging after centuries of concealment.