On my last night in Israel, I visited the old port of Jaffa, driven there by Miki and her husband, to ensure that I saw a bit of history in Tel Aviv. It was absolutely magical by night, the Harry Potter kind of magic. The old part of the fortified city has been restored and is now filled with art galleries, stone squares, street lights like golden flowers, cobbled Arabesque streets, and the sound of the sea.
The narrow, stepped lanes are overlooked by windows set in deep set walls and covered with metal grilles, to keep out pirates, marauders, and maybe modern day drunks. There are frequent intersections that are little courtyards created by graceful arches, all lit by golden lamplight, that you can imagine is what oil lamps would look like. Of course, no doubt a few hundred years ago, these same streets might have been dark and dangerous by night!
We passed the floodlit St Peter’s Church, and the home of Simon the Tanner. Jaffa was one of the places that Peter came to to spread the gospel, after the crucifixion and resurrection of our Lord. Both appear to be really ordinary places, strangely beautiful in their sheer ordinariness. People and the press make such a fuss about evil being so ordinary, of course it is, but then so is goodness. A lot of very ordinary people do extraordinary amounts of good, thank God.
I didn’t bother to take photos, as I know all my night photos come out blurry, as if I’ve had too much to drink! (Well, I did have a glass of wine.) So instead, I’m linking here to a set of photos taken by someone else, that capture what it looked like as we walked about last night.