Church of the Holy Sepulchre

Church of the Holy Sepulchre tickets: which one to buy

Entry is free and there is no ticket, which surprises people. What the church demands instead is timing and some preparation, because it is the holiest site in Christianity, it is shared uneasily by six denominations, and it is very crowded. Guided tours of the Christian quarter always include it, and a guide is genuinely valuable here: the building is a warren of chapels belonging to different churches, and without explanation most visitors see a queue and a lot of lamps.

Tours that start at dawn exist and are worth the hour. Rooftop access to the Ethiopian monastery above the church is separate and easy to miss. Modest dress is required and enforced. Bags are checked at the entrance to the old city rather than at the door. Photography is allowed in most of the building but not inside the tomb chamber itself.

Visiting Church of the Holy Sepulchre: what to see

Constantine's builders found what was identified as the tomb in the 320s, under a Roman temple raised on the site two centuries earlier, and the church was dedicated in 335. It has been destroyed, rebuilt and extended since, most drastically in 1009 and then by the crusaders. Two places are at its heart: Golgotha, reached by a steep stair to the right of the entrance, where the rock of the crucifixion is enclosed under an Orthodox altar, and the Edicule in the rotunda, a small stone chamber built over the tomb and restored between 2016 and 2017 after being held together with iron bands for decades.

Between them, at floor level, is the slab where the body is said to have been prepared. Custody is governed by a nineteenth-century agreement called the Status Quo, so rigid that a wooden ladder left on a ledge in the eighteenth century has never been moved, and the keys are held by two Muslim families. Beneath the church, a chapel cut into the rock holds crosses scratched by medieval pilgrims into the walls.

Church of the Holy Sepulchre opening hours and the best time to go

Come at opening, which in summer is around five in the morning; by nine the queue for the Edicule can be two hours and by midday the rotunda is solid. The church closes in the early evening, earlier in winter, and the hours shift with the season and the liturgical calendar. Holy Week is extraordinary and nearly impossible: the Western and Orthodox dates usually differ, and the ceremony of the Holy Fire on Orthodox Holy Saturday fills the building and the surrounding streets with tens of thousands of people under police control.

Fridays bring the Way of the Cross procession through the old city, ending here. Security arrangements change at short notice. Allow ninety minutes if you intend to queue for the tomb, half that if you do not. The doors are unlocked and locked each day by the same two families, a ceremony visitors may watch.