Warsaw April 30-May 5

I travelled to Warsaw to attend the International Congress on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East (ICAANE), held at the University of Warsaw. I arrived on Monday April 30 just in time for the first session of presentations in the Islamic Archaeology section. I gave my presentation about Madaba in the Early Islamic Period on Wednesday afternoon.
The weather was sunny and warm the entire time, except for a brief period of drizzle right when the conference group photograph was first scheduled.

May 1 was Labor Day, marked by a political rally and then a parade down the main street past the University.

The rally before the parade

The Labor Day parade

May 3 was Constitution Day, with another parade. Isolated marching bands continued to march down the street for a long time.

A marching band on Constitution Day

I spent the bulk of my time at the conference, which was a good occasion to meet people. I did only a little sightseeing beyond watching the parades; I had done a lot of sightseeing during my stay in Warsaw last year. On Friday, the last day of the conference, I went to the archaeology museum, which I had not seen last year, only to find that the museum was closed on Fridays. So I walked around the adjacent park for a while.

The Krasinskich Park

After the conference ended, I took an overnight train from Warsaw to Prague, arriving at 7:30 am. I had not been in Prague before, so I arranged to stop over for a few hours before continuing on to Germany. I walked around the old city, which reminded me of Bamberg, before returning to the train station, where I took a bus at 11:30 am to Nürnberg and then a train on to Bamberg.

A building façade in Prague

Jerusalem April 2-29

I spent the month of April at the Albright Institute in Jerusalem working on my various research projects.

On the morning of Monday April 2 I left Amman and traveled across the Allenby Bridge to Jerusalem, arriving at the Albright Institute about noon, after a travel time of just under five hours door to door. Years ago the average travel time was around three and a half to four hours, but the time on the Israeli side has increased in recent years.

The next day, Tuesday April 3, I participated in a workshop at the British Institute on Jerusalem and Constantinople, Cities of Caesar, Cities of God. The workshop was to a considerable extent a repeat of the workshop last July in Heidelberg. The organizer and most of the speakers were Germans who had been in Heidelberg. I also gave a reworked version of my Heidelberg presentation about relations between Jerusalem and Constantinople during the Iconoclastic Period.

In the course of the month, I spent a great deal of my time in the Albright Institute library reading through accounts of western pilgrims and travellers to Jerusalem for what they wrote about the al-Aqsa Mosque compound; a great many travel accounts I could download over the internet on googlebooks. I also proofread the first Gustaf Dalman volume about Palestinian customs and worked further on the captions to Humberto da Silveira’s photographs in his book about the al-Aqsa Mosque compound.

On Sunday April 9 was I able to start work in the al-Aqsa Mosque library. Khader Salameh, the library director, had stayed on in Amman after the Bilad al-Sham conference. Once he returned to Jerusalem he brought me my permit that allowed me to be on the compound independent of the tourist visiting hours. In the library I worked further on our catalogue of the Arabic inscriptions in the museum; during this stay I organized the photographs that we want to include in the catalogue.

On Friday April 14 I went to Ramallah to visit Khitam, one of my former students at the Institute of Islamic Archaeology from the 1990s. I first went to Khirbat Shuwaykah, the archaeological site on the south side of the city where I had worked with the Institute in the summers of 1996 and 1997.

Khirbat Shuwayka showing the squares I had excavated in 1996 and 1997

I then walked around the city center, and bought some Jerusalem-related books at a local bookstore, including one book published in 2013 – that date is repeated four times, so it was not a typo. I then met Khitam just when a parade of Boy and Girl Scouts passed by.

The book published in 2013

The parade

Khitam, who works as an architect in Ramallah, took me to her apartment for lunch; Uhud, another of my former students, was also there.

Khitam, Uhud and Me

On Thursday April 19 I participated in an evening workshop at the Yad Izhak Ben Zvi Institute that was part of a series sponsored by a Hebrew University study group about the Islamization of Palestine in the early Islamic period. I spoke about Christians and Muslims in Jordan in the Early Islamic Period. The Archaeological Evidence.

On Saturday morning April 28, I led the Albright fellows on a tour of Islamic monuments in the Old City.

Staying at the Albright were four scholars from China, supported by a new fellowship program. One evening one of the Chinese fellows had a birthday party; he invited some other Chinese friends, so for a time there were more Chinese present than Americans.

The group at the birthday party

The Chinese residents cooked a Chinese dinner on Sunday April 29, but unfortunately I had to leave for the airport just as the dinner started.

I took an overnight flight to Warsaw, Poland, which was the least expensive option, but at the cost of having a seven and a half hour layover in the Riga airport, but at least I was able to put that time in the Riga airport to profitable use.