Jerusalem

Jerusalem - darkometer rating : 4 - Nominally, Jerusalem is today the capital city of Israel but has long been, and still is, one of the most contested places in all of history. In fact, there are few places on earth that could match Jerusalem for the sheer weight of history, which you can feel on every corner. That alone makes it a most intriguing place to visit. For the dark tourist there is the additional specific site of Yad Vashem , one of the world's foremost Holcocaust memorial museums. > More background info > What there is to see > Location > Access and costs > Time required > Combinations with other dark destinations > Combinations with non-dark destinations > Photos More background info: Jerusalem is ancient. Very ancient – one the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. And a probably more contested one than any other place on earth too. It's been fought over in dozens of wars, for over three millennia. It was the heart of Jewish culture under King David, invaded and suppressed by the Romans (against whom Jesus, as in the historical figure, rebelled), in the Middle Ages it was conquered in the Muslim expansion, in turn became the main destination of the crusades, before Islam reasserted itself, was assaulted by Tartars and Mongols, became integrated into the Ottoman empire for several centuries, until towards the end of World War One it became part of a British Mandate administration before ending up part of the post- WWII independent state of Israel . Any of these stages warrant whole libraries of history books, but for our purposes this brutally short summary will have to suffice. To this day Jerusalem remains the spot where all three of the great monotheistic religions clash, often quite literally, like nowhere else.