Last Sunday morning we hopped in the car outside our hotel in Tel Aviv and cruised up the Israeli coast with the heat of the early summer’s day beating on the blacktop. Heading north with the whole of the Mediterranean Sea to our left: a journey that would have been familiar, in outline, to generations of medieval crusaders.
We were on our way from Jerusalem’s old port to the commercial capital of the crusader kingdom: Acre. We were in an air-conditioned SUV, rather than on horseback. Armed with smartphones, not swords. Otherwise there wouldn’t have been much to pick between us.
Why Acre? Most modern tourists in the Holy Land head elsewhere. Jerusalem, of course. Bethlehem and Nazareth. The Dead Sea. Acre (or Akko) is a relative backwater: a tiddly port town that lives in the shadow of nearby Haifa. Not much in the way of world-famous religious buildings or shrines. Not a lot to weep or fight over.
But for medievalists, Acre does have a couple of very impressive things going for it. First, an extraordinarily well preserved Hospitaller fortress, known locally as the Knights’ Halls. Second, a set of 150m-long tunnels running below the city, from the port to the spot where another famous fortress once stood.
The tunnels, which were only rediscovered in the modern age in 1994, are commonly associated with the tenants of that now-vanished fortress: the Knights Templar. They appear in pretty much every TV documentary you see about the Templars. It seems plausible, given their route, that they were used by the Templars in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
Yet as we found out in Acre, to think of them as ‘Templar tunnels’ may be completely misguided. And to extrapolate from that point to theories about Templar secrets, relics, mysteries and survival theories is downright crackpot.
Because here’s the thing…
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