Archeologists Martin Biddle and Birthe KjØlbye-Biddle have spent over a decade studying the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, but the work was never something they planned to do. It began with an unexpected phone call. “A telephone rang,” recalls Biddle, a professor of medieval archeology at Oxford University’s Hertford College, “and a chap we’d never heard of introduced himself. He said he would like to come and talk to us about the need to do a very accurate survey of the edicule, because it was going to have to be restored one day, and no one was sure if any observation would be permitted of the restoration.”
Martin Biddle and Birthe Kjølbye-Biddle
The project was right up their alley; the two have spent their careers involved in the archeology of religious structures and of medieval sites and towns. (Their current projects — which take up far more time than their work at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre — include the excavation of Christian churches in Egypt and the city of Winchester in England, as well as an Anglo-Saxon monastery that was captured by the Vikings in the 9th Century.) “We also knew Jerusalem quite well,” says Biddle. “I first worked there in the late 1950s, when I was very young indeed, digging up Jericho.”
Biddle’s interest in archeology began at an even earlier age. Like many in his field, he was bitten by the archeology bug as a child. “It goes right back to my school days, when I was already determined to be an archeologist,” he recalls. “Some boys want to be train drivers — I think I probably did — and others want to be archeologists. And the same was true for my wife. Although she is a musician and a mathematician, it was quite clear that it was archeology that she wanted to do.” Biddle remembers being at private school, learning to read Greek and Latin from about the age of eight, and wanting to work specifically on the archeology of cities. “The one city I had in mind was the great city of Balkh in Afghanistan. I’ve never set foot in it, but those days I thought I would.”
Currently, the Biddles have no immediate plans to go back to work at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which Martin Biddle describes as “a peaceful and wonderful” place. “I think that any place that has, for so long, been the scene of the most extraordinary human devotion and tragedy must be a moving place, whatever one’s personal religion,” he says. “The church has seen the most terrible things: awful massacres and terrible sacks. And yet when you are working in there at night — the communities will lock us in at night so that we can work when the tourists and pilgrims aren’t there — it is a very peaceful and quiet place, in spite of the horrors it has seen.” Biddle and his team hope they will be allowed to document the restoration of the Church and the edicule built around the purported tomb of Christ. As yet, no firm date has been set for the work. “Three years ago, we got a fax about another bit of the structure, near the tomb, saying ‘can you come, we badly need help,’ Biddle says. “We put together a small team of our collaborators and we went out within three weeks. So, nothing may happen, or the phone may ring. We just don’t know.”
