Old City of Jerusalem, Israel · Travel Poster

Each poster comes with a letter home. Ella writes about the place and its hidden history, and the details that never makes it into the guidebooks.

Everyone walks in through Jaffa Gate under those honey coloured walls, cameras up, heading straight for the markets, and almost nobody stops at the small iron railing just inside the gate on the left, where two plain stone graves lie side by side. They belong, the story goes, to the two architects that Suleiman the Magnificent hired to raise these very walls between 1537 and 1541. The walls are Ottoman, not ancient, far younger than they look, and when Suleiman saw the finished circuit he found that his men had left Mount Zion, with the tomb of King David and the room of the Last Supper, standing outside the line of stone. In the telling that Jerusalemites still pass on, he had the pair executed for the mistake, and then, because the walls themselves were so beautiful, he had them buried with honour just inside the gate they had built. Here is the part I love. Historians will gently point out that the wall follows the lie of the land and the size of the city far more than any sultan's temper, and that the two graves most likely hold a couple of Ottoman notables. But the legend has outlived every correction, so that the men who supposedly lost their heads for a line drawn slightly wrong now lie forever inside the one thing they got magnificently right. The guidebooks send you straight on to the bazaar. They rarely tell you that the first thing on your left, a single step inside the gate, is a five hundred year old tale of pride, punishment and a wall so fine it became its makers' tomb.

This poster is an original illustration in watercolour and ink, painted exclusively for the Ella's Adventures travel poster series.

No frame included.