Making a mandala deep in the quarry

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As explained in the previous post, one of Friday's Jane's Walk walks went down into Beer Sheva's ancient quarry. 
Guide Shir had us play some nature games, e.g. each of us had to find something natural that interested him/her and collect eight examples of it.

A botany student came up with a flower in different stages of development.

The geology student found a flint that had been knapped thousands of years ago.

Always attracted to spirals, I brought dry snail shells.

And then we arranged them on the earth into a mandala!
Click on the photo to see it well.

Long live this ancient quarry and long live these nice young people who love the earth and our Land!
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(Linking to Our World Tuesday.)
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The ancient, wild, huge quarry in Beer Sheva

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A nice, comfortably small group turned out for one of the Jane's Walks on Friday morning.
Shir was our good guide, extolling the value of slow meandering, taking us through fun exercises in positive psychology, and opening our eyes to better engage with nature.

Nice boys, eh?  I think they are students at Ben Gurion University of the Negev.
One studying geology said that we were sitting in part of a canyon formed millions of years ago, the Afiq (Gaza-Beersheba) canyon.

Today the quarry is in between Beer Sheva's residential blocks.
Its area is about 8 acres and it is very deep.  And very exciting!
(With a click or two you can enlarge the photos.)

The Ottomans (who controlled our area for 400 years) quarried stone here from 1900 to 1917  to build  their city of Beer Sheva (the area now known as the Old City).

Let us pray the quarry never becomes a construction site!
I hope it stays wild, but the next-best thing is an envisioned Geo-botanical Park and Center for Environmental Education in conjunction with the Nature Protection Society.

Here is the relevant part in a 2010 Jerusalem Post article called "Blueprint for Beersheva" --

One of the more underrated projects in the 2020 brochure is “The Quarry,” which lacks, at this point, a targeted completion date. To Beersheba activist Ethelea Katzanell, that’s unfortunate.

“The quarry – a hole in the heart of the city – is really an important ancient geological site located between the Bet and Daled neighborhoods,” she says. “Lots of people don’t even know it’s there – it’s fenced off, so you’d have to make a special effort to see it.

“I’m surprised this project isn’t being pushed forward – it has a big potential for quick implementation, and doesn’t involve a tremendous amount of money.”

The influential Katzanell serves on a host of city advisory boards. “I’m on the Environmental Committee, the Historical Site Committee and both the Tourist and Beautification Committees,” Katzanell laughs, as she ticks the assignments off. “Anything having to do with what the city offers people, both residents and tourists alike. To me, the Quarry is such an important asset to Beersheba, and one so close to completion, we should be moving ahead on this now.

“The history is fascinating. It started back in the 1980s. when the BGU Geology Department studied the area and proposed turning the quarry into a geological site – you can see the strata going back millions of years. They presented the idea to the city as an educational and tourist site very much like other geological sites all over the world. Nothing happened. They couldn’t find a sponsor.

“In 1994, the project was resurrected. An English version of the proposal was written up and presented again. All the city offices signed off on it, permits were approved, everything was ready – even a sponsor had been found, a French donor.

“Just as it was ready to go, the sponsor, for whatever reason, withdrew. And the project dropped out of sight, again.

“In 2007, I heard a rumor that the project was going to be killed – that a tower was going to be built on the Quarry site,” Katzanell continued. “I was horrified. I rewrote the project for a third time, included everything that had been proposed before, and turned it over to “Earth’s Promise,” a local environmental organization. Together with their experts, geologists and environmentalists, they proposed the creation of a Geo-botanical Park and Center for Environmental Education, in conjunction with the Nature Protection Society. The Park would include all the geographical distinctions, the strata marks, plus all the unique local vegetation for teaching and study.

“I’m surprised another sponsor hasn’t been found. This is a relatively modest project in terms of cost, and the city has already signed off on it. The Quarry Project could be completed pretty easily. I’m hoping that now, in 2010, we can finally move ahead with this.”

(Linking to ABC Wednesday and Camera Critters.)
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Quarries in Israel

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A quest for quarries today, for ABC Wednesday.

First, let's see two ancient masonry stone quarries in Jerusalem.
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The photo above was taken underground during the Jerusalem Light Festival, hence the eerie blue color.
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This is the huge quarry beneath the Old City from which Herod the Great took the "Herodian stones" needed to renovate the Temple and its retaining walls, including the Western Wall.
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We call it Zedekiah's Cave, but, as a fascinating article in The New York Times says,

"For the Freemasons, the cave is definitely Solomon's quarry, making it one of the most revered, perhaps the most revered, site of their international secret society. The organization considers King Solomon the first Freemason, and its tradition of doctrines, passwords and symbols derives from the building of Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem. In the absence of the Temple, Freemasons revere the quarry, and they hold an elaborate ceremony inside the cave once a year. "

This thousands of years old quarry was found when I worked at a salvage dig of a Canaanite cemetery.

Today the area is covered by the awful Holyland Park residences.

Moving on to modern quarries, here's one in the Givat Shaul neighborhood.

It looks like the cement mixers fill up on site and drive out to their construction site.

Today the apartments and yeshivas have come right up against the old quarries.

The area used to be Dir Yassin . . . .

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Further north, toward Haifa, this quarry is biting into Mount Carmel.

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The Jerusalem Post reported in 2008 that our Minister of National Infrastructures "warned that there would be shortages in raw materials by 2020. There are currently 80 working quarries in Israel, and about a thousand which have been tapped out and are in need of rehabilitation. However no new quarry has been approved by the national planning council in the last 14 years."
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But my favorite quarry photo is this memory of the great five days I lived in the village of Darajat, studying Arabic.

(For more about it, see under my label Darajat.)

Our Bedouin hosts took our small group up the mountain for a hike and to see the quarry in the Negev desert where they work.

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Hope you don't have dust in your eyes after looking at all these quarries. Shalom!

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