On the eastern slope of Mount Zion, just outside Jerusalem's Old City walls, stands the Church of Saint Peter in Gallicantu. Its name, Latin for 'cock's-crow,' commemorates Peter's threefold denial of Jesus before the rooster crowed, a poignant chapter in the Easter narrative. Raised in the twentieth century for the Assumptionist Fathers over the remains of a Byzantine sanctuary, the church is marked by a golden cockerel on its roof and by mosaic compositions of the trial and the denial. Christian tradition places the house of the high priest Caiaphas here, and the rock-cut chambers and cisterns below are shown as the place of Christ's detention, while outside a stepped stone street of the Roman period descends towards the Kidron Valley.
