The Making of Saint Anne: Architectural Biblification in Jerusalem

Since the 1830s, Jerusalem experienced both Ottoman modernization and increased European intervention which transformed the city from a remote Ottoman province into a global religious center. The history of the Church of Saint Anne demonstrates how Europeans redesigned pieces of Jerusalem’s urban fabric to fit a ״biblified״ mold, intentionally hearkening back to its sacred past. Contrary to our expectation that modernization means secularization, as Jerusalem became a modern city, its religious associations deepened.

The French Domaine of Saint Anne, located two hundred feet north of the Haram al-Sharif in the Old City of Jerusalem, includes a Catholic church, seminary, and archeological park. Despite its ancient appearance and associations with the roots of Christianity, this paper contends that the French government and its agents fabricated the complex in the latter half of the nineteenth century to advance their colonial ambitions. Through diplomatic maneuvers, they secured land and construction permits from the Ottomans in a highly strategic site. Employing placemaking techniques, they materialized a historical narrative that bolstered France's claim to the Holy Land. Saint Anne became sanctified as a site that intertwined modern France with the origins of Christianity and medieval Crusaders in a singular parcel of land.

The government's architect, Christophe Édouard Mauss, employed various architectural tactics to advance an overarching agenda of storytelling through placemaking. These strategies encompassed amalgamating small land parcels into a cohesive complex, demolishing existing structures, refurbishing the basilica as its idealized version following contemporary restoration theories, conducting archaeological excavations linking the complex to the Byzantine Empire and even to Jesus Christ himself, and building a new building in a complementary revival-style to collapse the different construction phases on-site into a unified whole. In the process of inscribing the French narrative in stone, the stories of the late Ottoman Jerusalem inhabitants were effaced.