Skull Hill (Jerusalem, Israel)

Skull Hill, Golgotha, Calvary - all the same place with different names. This was "a stone's throw" from the tomb where Christ was buried. In my mind, I had always pictured a big distance between the two but I was wrong. I always thought Christ was crucified on the top of a large hill or mount and I was wrong about that. It was a small hill.
In Aramaic "Golgotha" means "the place of the skull." This was the location of public execution.

Charity and I were standing where Christ was crucified when I took this picture. You can see that the Greyhound bus station is not far away from this hill we were on. In Christ's day the road to Jericho and Damascus was at the bottom of the hill where the bus station is today. This was the place of stoning and crucifying.

The side of the hill at Calvary contained tombs. No one was buried inside the city wall of Jerusalem. There were burial places all over outside of the city walls.
If you look closely in the middle of the picture above, you can see the indents like two eyes with the small indent below for the nose. The mouth was further down. Our guide said that Christ was buried just on the other side of this hill with the face. We had to walk around to get to the back side of it.

This is a picture taken at Skull Hill and the Garden Tomb parking. The man on the right was part of our tour group. If you look at all the people loitering in the area, you can imagine why we were warned so frequently about the risk of being pick pocketed.