(Roughly) Daily

In February 1862 the eldest son of Queen Victoria, the Prince of Wales and future King Edward VII, embarked on a four-and-a-half month journey through the Middle East. The royal party followed what was on the face of it a conventional itinerary, sailing from Venice down the Dalmatian coast on the royal yacht Osborne to Alexandria, cruising up the Nile to Aswan to view the sites of ancient Egypt, crossing to Jaffa for a tour of the Holy Land, then returning to England via the Ionian islands and Constantinople.

Among the party—included at the last moment—was the photographer Francis Bedford, who in over 190 prints produced one of the earliest photographic records of the region. These sepia studies, soft-lit yet rich in detail, were achieved with a cumbrous caravan of lenses, tripods, chemicals, plates, and a portable darkroom. His subjects were mostly but not all the sites of ancient or biblical significance that Western visitors already favored: the ruined survivors of a stupendous past that they could half claim for themselves…

The full story– and more photos– at “When the Ruins Were New.”

###

As we trek down memory lane, we might recall that it was on this date in 1099, after seven weeks of siege, that Christian forces of the First Crusade breached the walls of Jerusalem and began their massacre of the city’s Muslim and Jewish population.  The troubles began earlier in the 11th century, when Christians in Jerusalem came under increasing pressure from the city’s Islamic rulers– pressure that intensified when control of the holy city passed from the relatively tolerant Egyptians to the Seljuk Turks in 1071.  The troubles continue to this day.

Late medieval (14th or 15th century?) illustration of the capture of Jerusalem during the First Crusade

source