Tabgha

The springs are the reason the place exists, and they were engineered early. In the Byzantine period the water was gathered into three towers, Birket Ali edh-Dhaher at the Ein Nur spring, Hammam Ayyub and Tannur Ayyub, and carried by aqueduct to irrigate the Ginosar plain. The Custody of the Holy Land's plan still marks two of them among the numbered features of the site, one polygonal and one circular. Jerome called Heptapegon the erêmos, the lonely place, the same word the Gospels use of the spot where the crowd was fed.

One of those pools has turned into a conservation case. The octagonal reservoir at Ein Nur, on monastery land, is the only known home of Typhlocaris galilea, a blind, unpigmented cave shrimp. Its water runs warm at about 27 degrees, sulphurous and salty, and the species is critically endangered: groundwater extraction lets other water into the pool and shifts its chemistry and temperature. In 2013 the Israel Nature and Parks Authority asked the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo to breed it in captivity, against the day it is lost in the wild.

Tabgha was also an inhabited village, and that half of its history leaves nothing for a visitor to look at. The 1945 government statistics counted 330 people here, 310 Muslims and 20 Christians, on 5,389 dunams that included Tell el Hunud and Khan el Minya. On 4 May 1948, in Operation Broom, Palmach forces attacked with Alexandroni and local Haganah support; the inhabitants were expelled and their houses and tents destroyed on Yigal Allon's orders.

In 1889 the Palestine Association of German Catholics, tied to the Archdiocese of Cologne, bought the land, meaning to put up a hostel for pilgrims. Digging for foundations turned up an older church, and Ottoman law stopped them going further. A first survey followed in 1892 and then nothing for forty years.

The real work came under the British Mandate. Excavations in 1932 and 1936, led by Alfons Maria Schneider and A. E. Mader for the Jerusalem institute of the Görres Society, uncovered walls and mosaic pavements. By 1936 the floors were exposed and roofed over with a temporary church built purely to protect them, and that shed stood here for the next four decades.

What they had uncovered was two churches, one inside the other. The first was a small chapel of about 350, ascribed to Joseph of Tiberias, a Jewish convert whom Epiphanius describes as a member of the Sanhedrin, made a comes by Constantine and licensed to build churches in Galilee. That chapel is probably the shrine Egeria saw at the end of the fourth century, and her account of a well watered place with seven springs where the Lord fed the multitude is the earliest description of Tabgha there is. Around 480 it was taken down and a far larger basilica and monastery went up in its place, attributed to Martyrius, patriarch of Jerusalem from 478 to 486: roughly 56 by 33 metres, with workshops, monks' quarters and pilgrim lodging around the church.

How it ended is not agreed. The common date is 614 and the Persian invasion; some accounts prefer the Arab conquest a generation later. By about 670 the bishop Arculf reported only columns standing, and the site then dropped out of the record for some 1,300 years. The Benedictines have held it since 1939, as a daughter house of the Dormition Abbey in Jerusalem, while the land belongs to the German Association of the Holy Land.

The claim usually made for these floors is a strong one: they are the earliest known figurative mosaics of Christian art in the Holy Land. The panel everybody photographs sits in front of the altar and is very simple, a wicker basket of loaves flanked by two fish. Count the loaves and there are four, where Mark's account has five. The reading offered by the Franciscan foundation Pro Terra Sancta, and repeated by the German literature on the church, is that the missing fifth is the loaf consecrated on the altar above. That is an interpretation rather than a documented intention, but it is the one the building now stages.

The better mosaics are the ones people walk over on the way to that panel. The transepts and aisles carry waterbirds and marsh plants rendered precisely enough that the species can be named: duck, snipe, heron, goose, dove, swan, cormorant, flamingo and stork, among lotus, oleander and lily. The lotus does not grow in Galilee. Its presence marks the design as a Nilotic landscape, a genre popular in Roman and early Byzantine art, and Martyrius being an Egyptian is the usual explanation for why a Galilean church floor looks like the Nile in flood.

One motif in the right transept is stranger than the rest: a tower banded with Greek letters, the numerals for six to ten still legible. It is a nilometer, the graduated column used in Egypt to read the height of the flood. Whether the mosaicist meant it as Egyptian scenery or as a gauge for the level of the Sea of Galilee is not settled, and the lake's level is still the number this country argues about every winter.

The tesserae are limestone, running from blue-black through to white. Blue and green are absent altogether, which is worth knowing before looking at a marsh scene and wondering where the water went. The dating is disputed in a way English-language guides tend to flatten: the German account places the floors in the middle of the fourth century and the loaves-and-fishes panel, as the latest of them, at the start of the fifth, while the standard English summary assigns the whole scheme to the enlargement of about 480.

The church a visitor walks into was built between 1980 and 1982 by the Cologne architects Anton Goergen and Fritz Baumann, in a deliberately neo-Byzantine manner, on the fifth-century foundations and to the same floor plan. The Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Giacomo Beltritti, laid the foundation stone on 23 May 1980, and Cardinal Joseph Höffner, Archbishop of Cologne, consecrated the finished building exactly two years later. Some English sources give 1984 for the inauguration; the German record and the association's own account both say 1982.

The materials came from three countries: pale limestone quarried at Taybeh, the largely Christian village on the road between Jericho and Ramallah, red roof tiles from Italy, open roof timbering from Germany. The windows are glazed with alabaster panels rather than glass, which is why the interior light is the colour it is, and the bronze portal is by the German sculptor Elmar Hillebrand. Stretches of the original black basalt walling were left showing, so the join between the fifth century and the twentieth is visible at the wall base.

The honest complication is at the altar. The rock venerated as the stone on which the loaves and fish were laid, and the mosaic panel beside it, do not stand where the Byzantine builders put them: Pro Terra Sancta states plainly that the floor was moved forward in front of the altar during the modern reconstruction, more prominently than it originally sat, to press the Eucharistic reading of the image. The most photographed object at Tabgha is a genuine fifth-century floor in a place its makers did not choose. Other fragments are where they were: the sill of the left atrium entrance, basalt paving, part of the apse frieze, and, under a glass panel right of the altar, the foundations of the fourth-century chapel.

The second church is smaller, darker and closer to the water. The Chapel of the Primacy of Saint Peter is built of black basalt, put up in 1933 over earlier remains and restored in 1982, and it belongs to the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land rather than to the Benedictines up the slope. At the base of the walls opposite the altar the foundations of the fourth-century church show. Its predecessor outlasted every other church in this area and was finally destroyed in 1263. Paul VI came here in 1964 and John Paul II in March 2000.

Inside, a shelf of limestone rock projects in front of the altar. This is the Mensa Christi, the table of Christ, venerated as the spot where the risen Jesus laid out a breakfast of bread and fish and told Peter to feed his sheep, the third resurrection appearance in John 21. Egeria mentions a table, and which of the two Tabgha rocks she meant is disputed; a third Mensa Christi is shown at Nazareth. In the ninth century this place was known instead as the Place of the Coals, after the charcoal fire in the same chapter.

Outside, two things are worth not walking past. Cut into the shore below the chapel are a rocky bench and steps down into the lake, which the Custody identifies with the steps Egeria describes. And on the grass between the chapel and the water lie the Twelve Thrones, heart-shaped stone blocks set out for the apostles and first recorded in 808. Six survive, dated by the Custody to the Byzantine and Arab periods, between the fifth and ninth centuries. Most groups file past them to the water without noticing they are anything at all.

• Built 1933, restored 1982, Custody of the Holy Land
• Mensa Christi: the limestone shelf in front of the altar
• Foundations of a 4th to 5th century church at the wall base
• Rocky bench and steps to the water, identified with Egeria's steps
• Six surviving heart-shaped stones of the Twelve Thrones, 5th to 9th centuries
• Open later than the Multiplication church, to 17:00

In the early hours of 18 June 2015 a fire was set at the Church of the Multiplication; police were called at four in the morning. Some accounts date it to 17 June, but the Israeli reporting and the emergency call put it on the 18th. The blaze ran mainly on the roof and damaged a book store, offices and an event hall, and the German account puts the worst of it at the entrance, with the gate and southern atrium destroyed outright. A monk and a volunteer were treated for smoke inhalation. Hebrew graffiti in an entrance corridor quoted a line from the Aleinu prayer about false gods being wiped out.

The church itself came through, and so did the mosaics: the fifth-century pavement, basket and fish included, was not damaged. In late July 2015 four Israeli Jews aged between 18 and 24 and an unnamed minor were arrested and indicted, reportedly linked to the ultranationalist hilltop youth. In December 2017 Eyal Reuveni was sentenced to four years in prison for the attack.

The government had promised compensation within days, and the first payments came through in July 2016; with donations from Germany and from the Benedictines, that paid for eight months of work. The church reopened on 12 February 2017, with President Reuven Rivlin at the ceremony alongside Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki of Cologne, the German ambassador and the Druze spiritual leader Sheikh Muwaffaq Tarif. The Times of Israel reported the repairs at around one million dollars, of which the Israeli state paid nearly 400,000.