It is one of the Christian religious monuments in the world, where they claim that Jesus Christ was crucified and buried in it, and that was on Friday, and then rose from his grave on Sunday, and so it was called the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

The first to build this church was Queen Helena, the mother of King Constantine, and they call her a saint because she went to Jerusalem, and she imagined the places of the crucifixion of Christ and his resurrection and his meeting with the apostles, etc .it is known that Constantine was the first to enter the Christian religion from the Byzantine emperors, and he built the city of Constantinople after his name, which made it the capital of his king, and then later turned to islambol (Istanbul) after the conquest of the young Ottoman Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre was built by Helena in 335 ad, and then destroyed by the Persians in cooperation with the Jews in the days of Khosrau II when they defeated the Byzantines in 614 ad, and the Jews and Persians burned all Christian monuments when they entered Jerusalem under the leadership of Khosrau II .

It was She Who Built The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in 335, the Church of Calvary in 336, the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, the Church of the ascension on the Mount of Olives, and all the important churches for Christians built by this woman, who was called a saint.. She was identifying places based on visions and dreams that appeared to her, according to them .

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is considered the most important Christian landmark in the world, and includes a large complex of buildings within an area of 80 × 66 meters, and the current buildings date back to 1869 after a fire broke out, and its buildings were hit by a number of Jewish shells in 1948, and the church property was stolen from Jews after the occupation of Jerusalem in 1967.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre was destroyed many times, first inم ad, and then rebuilt by Hercules in 624 AD, and Omar ibn al-Khattab visited it when he opened Jerusalem in 637 /17 Ah .safronius, patriarch of Jerusalem, asked him to pray in it when the prayer caught him, but Omar Allah said: no, so that later Muslims would not say here Omar prayed, so they would take that as an excuse to build a mosque on the site of the church, and then Omar committed suicide outside the church and prayed there.

The Muslim rulers did not attack these churches except in the case of the Fatimid caliph, the ruler, by the command of Allah, who was infected with a blight in his mind, and he demolished the Church of the Holy Sepulchre because of the Crusaders ' attack on Egypt and their repeated assaults in (1010), and it was rebuilt again during the reign of his apparent successor in (1022/5412), and this church, like other churches, remained in the care of Muslims until the Christians, as a result of their strong differences over who owns the keys to this church and their bitter fight because of it, made these keys to two Muslim holy families, the AL-Gouda (they were called Al-ghadiya in the old days, and they are 1) and the nasibah family(they are from Khazraj and belong to a woman named nasibah).

The construction of the church consists of four main sections: the Anastasis dome based on Columns Above The Rock, which Anastasis claims is that Christ is a tomb under it, then the courtyard surrounded by columns on three sides (the baptismal courtyard) and in its northeast corner is a rock on which they claim that Christ was crucified with thieves, and the courtyard is followed by the large church consisting of five arcades, called the martiron Martyrion, which is بطول meters long and وعرض meters wide, and was decorated with mosaics and beautiful icons, and comes after the atrium atrium, which is the outer courtyard of the church, which is connected to it by a staircase on the street, is called the pylium.

The traveler Nasir Khosrow described the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in his journey called "Namah travel" when he entered Jerusalem (438 Ah / 1047 ad) and said :

This spacious church can accommodate eight thousand people, it is highly decorated with colored marble, inscriptions and images, it is decorated from the inside with brocade (silk) and images, decorated with gold paint, and in many places, including the image of Jesus riding a donkey, and images of other prophets.. In this church there is a panel divided into two parts, half of which describes Paradise and its people, and half describes the fire and its people .. This church has no counterpart anywhere in the world .

Al-Idrisi, a traveler who died in 560 Ah/1165 ad, mentioned it and said that it was called the garbage church because it was built before Constantine entered Christianity, because the Jews made the crucifixion of Christ garbage in spite of the Christians, and described the dome that tops the church, and said that it is one of the wonders of the world, and the church has a door that descends thirty degrees, and it is called the door of St. Mary, and these two doors, one of them facing north, where the door of St. Mary and the other door are met from the East by a very great church, and in the east of this church is a place where they claim that Christ was imprisoned and a place Crucifixion, and in the dome are images of Christ, the Virgin Mary, the prophets and John the Baptist. The Holy Sepulcher is located under the dome of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, and the alleged tomb is divided into two rooms, in the center of one of them is a stone that is said to have been the door of the tomb, and the Angels rolled it so that Jesus came out of it when he rose from it, and there are 15 candelabra, and the tomb is covered with a large slab of marble, and 43 candelabra were hung in the ceiling of the Tomb.

The church contains many antiques, precious jewels, the sword of Peter the great, Tsar of Russia, an old Bible, and numerous antiques.

The Islamic covenant

In the Islamic era, the Amir of the faithful Omar ibn al-Khattab built a mosque near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, to denote coexistence and tolerance between the Islamic and Christian religions.

When the Ayyubid leader Saladin liberated Jerusalem from the Crusaders in 1187, he preserved the church and respected its religious status, and after a dispute between Christian families over who would acquire the key to the church, Saladin advised that the key be given to a Muslim family that would be responsible for the church, and everyone agreed to this, and it became supervised by two Muslim families, namely the Nusaybah family, which opens and closes the doors of the church morning and evening, and the family of Gouda al-Husseini, who holds the keys to the church and keeps them.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre has collected a large and distinctive number of Architectural Arts since its construction, and represented a unique architectural pairing between different building schools in the East and the West, and the church's exposure to demolition and burning incidents was an opportunity each time to rebuild and renovate it, and add the appropriate arts that characterize each era.

In 1808, a major fire destroyed many artistic aspects, and it was later restored, and in 1834 and 1927, two earthquakes affected its foundations, prompting the British Mandate authorities to put iron and wooden supports to protect it from natural disasters.

Closure

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, like other Islamic monuments, was not spared from Israeli violations, and on February 25, 2018, the Christian communities in Jerusalem announced their unanimous decision to close the church, in protest against the decision of the occupation municipality to impose taxes on church properties there, the second closure in its history, and both times under the Israeli occupation, as the closure was previously thirty years ago, specifically on April 27, 1990.