No street in the world carries a comparable weight of memory. Running from the north-east of the Old City to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Via Dolorosa follows the route that Christian tradition identifies with the last walk of Jesus towards Golgotha. Fourteen Stations of the Cross punctuate it, some marked by chapels and convents, others by a plaque above a shopfront, for the way passes through a living city: covered markets, spice stalls, schoolchildren, the constant traffic of a quarter inhabited for millennia. Every Friday afternoon a Franciscan procession takes the route with prayers in many languages; at Easter it becomes a slow river of pilgrims. Filmed in 4K within the walled city inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list, the programme follows the stations one by one, reading the layers of Roman paving, Crusader vaults and Ottoman stone that make Jerusalem a city written on top of itself.
