St Peter's Church

Jaffa appears in Acts as a port town with an established community of Jewish believers. Peter comes down from Lydda, raises a woman named Tabitha, and stays on in the house of a tanner called Simon by the sea. It is on that roof, in the account the Custody of the Holy Land reproduces on its Jaffa page, that he sees a sheet let down from heaven holding creatures both pure and impure and is told not to call impure what God has made clean. He then travels to Caesarea at the invitation of the centurion Cornelius, whose household becomes the first group of pagan converts received into the Church.

That is the reason there is a Catholic sanctuary on this headland at all, and it explains the one architectural oddity a visitor is likely to notice. Churches are conventionally oriented east. This one is not: BibleWalks records the main altar facing west, and reads the arrangement as turning the church towards the sea and towards the reputed house of Simon the Tanner. Wikipedia's infobox, working from the street rather than the axis, gives the facade direction as southeast. No survey of the building is published.

The tanner's house is not part of the church and is not run by the Custody. See The Holy Land places it at 8 Simon the Tanner Street, a few minutes away towards the lighthouse, and describes it as an inconspicuous nineteenth-century building. Visitors who go looking for a first-century roof will not find one, here or anywhere else in Jaffa.

The plot was a castle before it was a church. The Custody says the present building stands where the fortress of Louis IX of France had stood, and that the king who built it was the same king who brought the Franciscans to Jaffa; his statue is in the friary cloister. The chronology behind that sentence is well documented even where the church's own signage is loose. Britannica records Louis IX embarking from Aigues-Mortes on 25 August 1248 with roughly 35,000 men, losing his army at al-Mansurah in February 1250, being captured that April, and then staying on in the Holy Land for four years, turning a military defeat into a diplomatic one and fortifying the Christian cities.

Which crusade that was depends entirely on who is counting, and the sources a visitor is most likely to read do not agree. The Custody calls it the sixth crusade and dates the fortress to about 1251. See The Holy Land calls it the ninth. Britannica, following the standard numbering, calls Louis IX's expedition of 1248 to 1254 the Seventh Crusade. The disagreement is over labels, not events, but it is worth knowing before a guide asserts one of them with confidence.

There is a second attribution problem. Wikipedia's article on the church, citing Kliot, Mansfeld and Sagi's study of Christian tourism to the Holy Land, says the citadel was erected by Frederick I and restored by Louis IX. Frederick I is Barbarossa, and Britannica records him drowning in the Göksu on 10 June 1190 while on the Third Crusade, well short of the coast of Palestine. The emperor whose crusade of 1228 to 1229 returned territory in the Holy Land to Latin rule was Frederick II.

The fortress did not last long after Louis IX left. On 7 March 1268 the Mamluk sultan Baybars took Jaffa, the citadel was demolished, and its timber and marble were sent to Cairo for a mosque he was building. That was the end of the Crusader presence in the south of the country, and it is the reason the medieval remains on this site amount to two rooms and a tower stump rather than a castle.

• 1228 to 1229: Frederick II's crusade returns Latin rule to part of the coast
• 1248 to 1254: Louis IX's expedition, which Britannica numbers the Seventh Crusade
• c. 1251: the Custody's date for the fortress on this site
• 7 March 1268: Baybars takes Jaffa and has the citadel pulled down

The Franciscans came back to the ruined castle as hosts rather than as builders. The Custody dates their guesthouse in Jaffa to 1650, opened to receive the growing number of pilgrims landing at the port on their way inland. A church followed in 1654, dedicated to St Peter and raised over the Crusader remains, and that is the consecration date Wikipedia's infobox still carries.

It did not survive the eighteenth century. Wikipedia states flatly that the church was twice destroyed and twice rebuilt in the late 1700s, without saying by whom on either occasion, and See The Holy Land repeats the same bare formula. What is attached to the period instead is a story about the surviving citadel rooms: both sources record that Napoleon is believed to have lodged in them after he took Jaffa in 1799. The verb in every account is a hedge, and this page keeps it.

The building a visitor walks into now is the fourth on the site and was paid for from Spain. The Custody says plainly that it was built by the Spanish between 1888 and 1894, and Wikipedia classes the result as New Spanish Baroque, with one spire, a tall brick facade and the tallest bell tower in Old Jaffa. A renovation in 1903 is the last major work recorded on the church itself; the friary behind it was overhauled in the 2000s.

So the honest inventory is short. Nothing in the nave is medieval. The thirteenth-century material is outside and to the right of the sacristy, two circular rooms with low ceilings and embrasures cut for firearms, plus a large round tower in the north-western corner of the friary courtyard with a stone chapel in its basement. Everything else, including the whole silhouette that has served as a landmark for ships approaching Jaffa, is late Victorian.

• 1650: Franciscan guesthouse for pilgrims landing at Jaffa
• 1654: first church, over the Crusader ruins
• Late 18th century: destroyed twice, rebuilt twice
• 1799: Napoleon said to have lodged in the citadel rooms
• 1888 to 1894: the present church, funded from Spain
• 1903: the last major renovation of the church

The interior is a European nineteenth-century church transplanted whole: a high vaulted ceiling, marble on the walls, and coloured glass doing most of the work. The windows came from the Munich studio of Franz Xaver Zettler, who lived from 1841 to 1916 and set up his own stained glass firm in 1870, having married into the Mayer family whose Munich workshop remains the better-known name in the trade.

The four main panels run through the life of Peter: the miraculous catch of fish, the giving of the keys, the Transfiguration on Mount Tabor and the washing of the feet at the Last Supper. Almost every other window in the church shows a Spanish saint, which follows directly from who paid for the building; the exceptions are Tabitha, whom Peter raised in this town, Francis of Assisi, and the Immaculate Conception. Above the high altar hangs a painting of Peter's vision by the Catalan artist Talarn, named by the Custody and by very little else in print.

Two objects are worth going in for on their own. The pulpit is carved in wood in the shape of a fruiting tree, described in the Custody's own text and in See The Holy Land's account as lifelike rather than stylised. And since 15 June 2014 the church has held a small pipe organ built in 1847 by Agati Nicomede e Fratelli of Pistoia, in Tuscany: it was rebuilt by the Spanish Franciscan organ builder Delfino Fernandez Taboada, stood for years in the Christian Information Centre in Jerusalem, and was dismantled and reassembled here by the Israeli organ builder Gideon Shamir. The Terra Sancta Organ Festival, which is run out of the Custody, describes it as the oldest organ in use in Israel and Palestine. It has a fifty-note keyboard and a short stop list including Principale 8', Ottava 4', Decimaquinta 2' and Voce Angelica 8'.

The friary behind the church is not on the visitor route, and the description of it that circulates comes from Wikipedia rather than from the Custody. It has the eastern range built around the courtyard with the statue of Louis IX at its centre, an arcade on two sides, a library up a narrow stair from the tower basement holding a collection heavy in Polish, and the friars' own quarters in the higher western range, with views from the top floor over the Mediterranean and Andromeda's rock. The same account puts four friars in residence, two Poles, an Englishman and a Chilean; the Custody does not publish a number.

The most interesting thing about St Peter's is not its architecture but its timetable. The Custody keeps two churches in Jaffa: St Anthony, up the hill, which is the parish with the schools serving Arabic-speaking Israeli citizens, and St Peter's, which is a shrine on the promontory. Between them the friars run services for Christian migrant and asylum-seeking communities whose combined number, on the Custody's own statement, exceeds that of the local Christian population: Filipinos, Indians in several languages, Eritreans, Ethiopians, Nigerians, Ghanaians, Sri Lankans, Latin Americans, Italians, Poles and others.

The mass list published by the Christian Information Centre in Jerusalem, which is also a Custody body, shows what that looks like in a week. Sunday has English at 09:00, Polish at 18:00 and Hebrew at 19:15. Saturday carries the anticipated Sunday masses, Spanish at 18:00 and Hebrew at 19:15. Monday and Friday open with morning prayer at 06:45 and an English mass at 07:00, with adoration of the Blessed Sacrament from 06:15 on Fridays. Wikipedia notes that Polish workers come to pray here on Saturdays, their day off.

The Hebrew line is the unusual one. Israel's Hebrew-speaking Catholic community was founded in the mid-1950s by immigrants who belonged to the Jewish people by birth or by family and wanted to practise as Catholics; the Vatican approved it on an experimental basis in 1955, and it was celebrating mass in Hebrew that same year, long before the Second Vatican Council permitted the vernacular elsewhere. Catholics and Cultures, the research project at the College of the Holy Cross, counts about a thousand members across seven cities and reports that 650 gathered for the sixtieth anniversary in 2015. It also states that St Peter's in Jaffa is home to the largest of those congregations, which is why a visitor who turns up at a quarter past seven on a Sunday evening hears this church praying in Hebrew.

None of that is on a sign outside. Visiting hours end at 17:00 and the congregations arrive afterwards, so the church most tourists see and the church that is actually used barely overlap.