A wonderful place we've never heard of--

We've travelled for 6 days now seeing all the wonderful places that we've read about and seen pictures of most of our lives.  But yesterday we stopped at a place that I have never read about, heard of and can find no information on the Internet.  That may be related to my spelling, but I've tried it many ways.  Arabic is nothing like English and words are spelled different ways--think Gadaffi, Kadaffi etc.  Phonetically, I spell it al Makelat.  There are great advantages to being 4 people in a private van with a driver. One of them is that we can go places that tour buses can't.  Anyway, our guide drove to a place high up in the mountains close to the famous site where Moses viewed the promised land and later died. Nabil, our guide, told us he had a surprise for us.  We drove up a dirt road, passing sheep and goat herds to a cinder block building at the top of a hill overlooking the Jordan valley.

Very unimpressive until we went inside.  The distinct outline of a small church with broken columns on each side leading to an elevated altar and the floor was covered with the mosaics of early Christian themes.  This is the original old city of Nebo.

Bedouins had been living here for many years and the dark spot on the mosaics is where their cooking fire was!  They didn't realize that their camp was on the ruins of an ancient church that dates to the approximately 350 AD and that a few inches below their cooking fire was a priceless treasure.  This is definitely one of the first churches in the world. Christians were persecuted and their religion was illegal until 313 AD when Roman Emperor Constantine issued the Edict of Milan that legalized Christian worship.

The detail of the mosaics are exquisite and my pictures just don't do them justice!

The site is guarded by a middle aged Bedouin man whose grandmother as the matriarch of the family in the 1920s sold the land to the Franciscans for 50 gold dinar--an enormous amount of money at the time.  He now watches over the site for tips from the few people like us who brave this road off the beaten tourist path to visit the church. The Franciscans also own the tourist site of Mt Nebo where we also visited.

His grandmothers still watches over the site from her grave close by.

One other impressively located castle that was not on the tourist itinerary that we were lucky enouugh to visit is Shobak.  It is over 4000 feet above sea level and from it's hilltop perch can view the surrounding countryside for invaders from any side.  Didn't help in the long run because in 1189 Saladin troops conquered this Christian stronghold and added it to the growing Muslim world.