The light shines on Jerusalem
JERUSALEM — When night falls on the Old City of Jerusalem this week, the walled enclave sheds its role as one of the world’s most contested pieces of real estate to become a luminous carnival of art installations and performances.
Jerusalem’s Festival of Lights, now in its third year, illuminates an area known more for religious friction and clashing political claims than for art or nightlife. Most nights, the Old City’s stone alleyways are dimly lit, peopled mainly by small numbers of tourists, Palestinian merchants and children, and ultra-Orthodox Jews headed to or from religious studies or prayers.
But for seven nights, until June 22, a shining three-metre-tall puppet named Meir — Hebrew for “the illuminator” — entertains visitors with antics like trying to scale the wall of the moat at the Tower of David, used by conquerors across the millennia as a fortress, barracks and gun emplacement.
Dozens of neon bars hanging from an 11-metre-high willow tree made of wire, and great dandelions of wire and light, light up the walls at Jaffa Gate, the portal of sand-coloured hewn stone blocks that is one of the eight gates in the Old City walls. Magical creatures are projected on to the newly renovated facade of another entrance, Damascus Gate.
Categories: Israel, Middle East