Just inside the church’s main entrance, on the right, two staircases lead up to Golgotha, which in Hebrew means “Place of the Skull” and was translated into Latin as Calvary. The space here is divided into two chapels. On the left is the Greek Orthodox chapel, with its altar placed directly over the rocky outcrop on which the cross of Christ’s Crucifixion is believed to have stood. The softer surrounding rock was quarried away when the church was built and the remaining, fissured, so-called Rock of Golgotha can now be seen through the protective glass around the altar. It can be touched through a hole in the floor under the altar. The 12th Station of the Cross is commemorated here.

To the right is the Roman Catholic chapel, containing the 10th and 11th Stations of the Cross. The silver and bronze altar was given by Ferdinand de Medici in 1588. The 1937 mosaics encircle a Crusader-era medallion of the Ascension on the ceiling. The window looks into the Chapel of the Franks.

Between these altars is the Altar of the Stabat Mater, commemorating Mary’s sorrow as she stood at the foot of the cross. It marks the 13th Station of the Cross. The wooden bust of the Virgin is 18th century.

Archaeological evidence that the church rests on a possible site of the Crucifixion is scant, but positive. Excavations show that the site lay outside the city walls until new ones encompassed it in AD 43; that in the early 1st century it was a disused quarry in which an area of cracked rock had been left untouched; and that rock-hewn tombs were in use here in the 1st centuries BC and AD. This all tallies with Gospel accounts of the Crucifixion.

Immediately beneath the Greek Orthodox chapel on Golgotha, this chapel is built against the Rock of Golgotha. It is the medieval replacement of a previous Chapel of Adam that was part of Constantine’s 4th-century basilica. It was so called because tradition told that Christ was crucified over the burial place of Adam’s skull – a tradition first recorded by the Alexandrian theologian Origen (c.AD 185–245).

The crack in the Rock of Golgotha, clearly visible in the apse, is held by believers to have been caused by the earthquake that followed Christ’s death (Matthew 27: 51).

The present-day shrine around the tomb of Christ was built in 1809–10, after the severe fire of 1808. It replaced one dating from 1555, commissioned by the Franciscan friar Bonifacio da Ragusa. Before that, there had been a succession of shrines replacing the original 4th-century one destroyed by the sultan Hakim in 1009. Constantine’s builders had dug away the hillside to leave the presumed rock-hewn tomb of Christ isolated and with enough room to build a church around it. They had also had to clear the remains of an AD 135 Hadrianic temple from the site, as well as the material with which an old quarry had been filled to provide the temple’s foundations. In so doing, the Rock of Golgotha was also found.

Today the shrine, owned by the Greek, Armenian, Coptic, and Roman Catholic communities, contains two chapels. The outer Chapel of the Angel has a low pilaster incorporating a piece of the stone said to have been rolled from the mouth of Christ’s Tomb by angels. It serves as a Greek Orthodox altar. A low door leads to the tiny inner Chapel of the Holy Sepulchre with the 14th Station of the Cross. A marble slab covers the place where Christ’s body was supposedly laid. The slab was installed here in the 1555 reconstruction and purposely cracked to deter Ottoman looters.

In the Coptic chapel behind the shrine, a piece of polished stone is shown as being part of the tomb itself, but it is granite and not limestone, as the tomb here is known to be.

The Rotunda is built in Classical Roman style. The outer back wall (now hidden by interior partitions) survives from the 4th-century basilica up to a height of 11 m (36 ft). The 11th-century dome was replaced after the 1808 fire and the two-storey colonnade built. The first two columns on the right, standing with your back to the nave, are replicas of two that survived the fire, but were judged unstable. The originals were made in the 11th century from the two halves of a single, gigantic Roman column – part either of the 4th-century basilica or of the previous Hadrianic temple.

In the Rotunda’s back wall is the Syrian Chapel. It contains Jewish rock tombs (c.100 BC–AD 100), marking the limit to which the hillside was dug away when the first church was built.

From the ambulatory in the Crusader-period apse, now the choir in the Greek Catholikon, steep steps lead down to St Helena’s Chapel. The crosses on the walls were carved by pilgrims. Although this crypt was built by the Crusaders, who reused Byzantine columns, the side walls are, in fact, foundations of the 4th-century basilica. More stairs go down to the Inventio Crucis (Finding of the Cross) Chapel, a former cistern, in which St Helena is said to have found the True Cross. The statue of her is 19th century.

This simple monastery is approached either through the Coptic chapel in the corner of the courtyard, to the right of the main entrance, or from Souk Khan el-Zeit, up steps beside Zalatimo’s, a famous pastry shop.

It occupies a series of small buildings on the roof of St Helena’s Chapel, among the ruins of the former Crusader cloister. The Ethiopians were forced up here in the 17th century, when, unable to pay Ottoman taxes, they lost ownership of their chapels in the main church to the Copts.