No building in Christendom is more layered or more contested. Successive churches have stood here since the fourth century, destroyed, rebuilt and remodelled, leaving a structure that reads as an accumulation rather than a design: the Crusader facade, the rotunda covering the Aedicule that shelters the tomb, the stairs climbing to the rock of Golgotha, chapels of different rites opening at every level, and cisterns and quarries beneath. Six communities — Greek Orthodox, Armenian, Franciscan, Coptic, Syriac and Ethiopian — share the church under the Status Quo, an arrangement so precise that no lamp may be moved, and the doors are opened each morning by a Muslim family whose role has passed down through generations. Filmed in 4K, the programme follows the architecture, the liturgies and the choreography of coexistence.
