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I am lucky!
I just have to walk a block or two from my moshav/village, out into the terraced valleys of the Jerusalem Hills, to find pictures for today's
City Daily Photo Theme Day, which is
"The beauty of decay."
This rounded place on a hill slope is one of my favorites.
See its arched opening, now half buried by the ages?!
I try to imagine who used it, when, and for how long . . .
Please
enlarge these photos with one click, then another.
I left them big so you can enjoy the luscious details.
The hills are peppered with mysterious stone structures that are thousands of years old.
They are hard to date, but some go back even to 4,500 years ago.
Archaeologists have proof that different peoples have inhabited this area for 6,000 years.
The door and a window of this now low structure on the valley floor are still visible.
The big pine tree toppled over in last winter's rain and now it, too, will start to decay.
A
forest fire swept through this valley a few years ago, but this tall cypress survived.
It thrives between two dams.
Jerusalem is surrounded by hills and the only way to raise crops was to build agricultural terraces.
Farmers picked rocks from the ground and used them to build terrace walls; they may have had to bring in soil for each little plot.
They devised irrigation channels from the many springs in the Jerusalem Hills.
In the bottom of the valleys they built dams, as pictured above.
When rain water rushed down the valley from the hills, these dams stopped the soil from being washed away.
In
Biblical days, farmers were able to feed their families from these
terraces as well as most of the great throngs of pilgrims who ascended to
the Temple in nearby Jerusalem on the three yearly pilgrimage festivals.
In recent centuries, up to 1948, Arab farmers grew many fruit and olive trees and I'm not sure what else in the hills.
I admire all who did this hard work in a not easy land.
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To see how farmers used stone
shomerot, watchmen's huts, please see
previous posts.
There are hundreds here in the Jerusalem Hills in various stages of decay.
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Now let's go visit the other
CDP bloggers and see what's decaying in their cities.
Shalom to all.
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(Linking also to Toby's meme (in Israel!)
Whimsical Windows, Delirious Doors.)
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Passing this curb on the way to and from the dig site everyday used to make me laugh.
For RuneE's "Bench on Friday" mini-meme over at Visual Norway (to which you are invited), here is a whole truckload of picnic benches.
The sign calls this strange thing lying in a Jerusalem street a colossal monolithic column.
September 1 is Theme Day at City Daily Photo. See what the CDP bloggers have posted for our BIG theme.Click here to view thumbnails for all participants
This is how the narrow lanes of Jerusalem's Old City look today. Modern pavement. This big improvement was made in 1977.
Some tourists walk on this plaque in one street without noticing. But it gives great news!
They were brought up and incorporated into the present street level in a few places. Brilliant! Now you really feel like you are walking on history!
The Romans made grooves, striations, to prevent horses from slipping.
But the smooth stone of both the old and the new pavements is slippery, especially when wet.
Walking on Roman pavement is just a normal thing for the Old City residents, but I still get excited every time my feet touch them. 
A friend emerges from the entrance of the rock-hewn tomb. It is unmarked and easy to miss, below a little hill in a public park in Jerusalem's New City. 
"And very early on the first day of the week the women went to the tomb . . . And they were saying to one another, 'Who will roll away the stone for us from the door of the tomb?' And looking up, they saw that the stone was rolled back; for it was very large." . . . 
