Christianity's holiest church was built over a Roman temple to Aphrodite
Around AD 135 the emperor Hadrian filled in a rock-cut tomb in Jerusalem and built a temple to Aphrodite on top. Two centuries later Constantine had the temple torn down to uncover what was identified as the tomb of Jesus. The church raised there has been burned, razed and rebuilt ever since.
The Church of the Holy Sepulchre stands in the Christian Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City and is Christianity's holiest site. Tradition going back to the 4th century places both Calvary, where Jesus was crucified, and his empty tomb inside it, along with the last four stations of the Via Dolorosa. Eastern Christians call it the Church of the Anastasis, Greek for resurrection. Archaeologists broadly accept that the location plausibly matches the burial accounts, noting several mundane details in the Gospel of John that fit the site.
The story of its founding is dramatic. After Jerusalem was ruined in AD 70, Hadrian founded a Roman colony there and buried the tomb under his temple. Once Constantine began favouring Christianity, Bishop Macarius asked permission to dig; about 326 the temple came down and a rock-cut tomb emerged. Three crosses were reportedly found nearby, one presumed to be the True Cross. Mortar testing has since confirmed the first shrine around the tomb dates from Constantine's time. The architect Zenobius designed a rotunda over the tomb and a basilica across a courtyard, consecrated on 13 September 335.
Destruction followed repeatedly. Persian forces under Khosrow II burned it in 614 and carried off the True Cross; Emperor Heraclius rebuilt it in 630. Early Muslim rulers protected it, and a story tells of Caliph Umar praying outside so that no one could later claim the church as a mosque. Fires and riots damaged it in the 9th and 10th centuries, and on 18 October 1009 the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim ordered it destroyed entirely, leaving only fragments of the tomb. A Byzantine deal allowed reconstruction, completed in 1048, and the outrage in Europe fed the mood behind the Crusades.
Crusaders captured the church on 15 July 1099, and Godfrey of Bouillon refused the title of king, calling himself Defender of the Holy Sepulchre. Today it is the seat of the Armenian, Greek Orthodox and Latin patriarchs of Jerusalem, and under the Status Quo arrangement of 1757 six denominations share parts of it in rules largely unchanged for over 160 years.
Source: Church of the Holy Sepulchre
