Byzantine Church of Jabalia

Byzantine Church in Gaza

The Byzantine Church in the Gaza Strip, which today is the remains of a Christian church, includes graves and mosaic floors surrounded by marble columns on an area of 850 square meters, including 400 meters paved with mosaics. It is more than 1,700 years old, and has lived through 24 Byzantine emperors and 14 Muslim caliphs from the two Abbasid states since its inception. And the Umayyads.

Location and date of discovery

The church is located northeast of Gaza City, within the municipal boundaries of the city of Jabalia in the northern governorates - Gaza, west of the Salah al-Din Road - Gaza - Beit Hanoun. Its construction dates back to the year 444 AD, the time of the Byzantine Emperor (Theodosius II), who ruled between the years (408 AD - 450 AD).

The Byzantine Church in Jabalia is considered one of the most important churches in the Levant. Since Islam conquered Palestine in 637 AD, the Church continued to exist until the Abbasid Islamic era, the era of the Caliph (Abu Jaafar al-Mansur). Christians and churches in the period of Islamic rule in Palestine include 16 ancient Greek texts, and this number cannot be found in any church in the Levant.

The church's decoration contains a large number of geometric and floral decorations, figure paintings, rural scenes, cooking utensils, domestic animals and predatory animals from Palestine and abroad, and various types of tuna. It also includes hunting scenes, rivers, and palm trees, but most of these decorations were destroyed during the iconoclastic war. (107-252 AD/726-867 AD), and there were no traces of these decorative elements that could be recovered or repaired.

The church is built on the cathedral system, and there are three porticoes, the widest of which is the middle portico, and there is a church on the northern side of the church. This is the nature of the Palestinian architecture of the church, which covers an area of 500 square meters. In 2010, the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities installed a canopy to protect the mosaic floor from erosion.

The church is divided into three sections: the first is the church building where the prayer ceremony is held, the second is the small church, and the third is the baptismal aisle.