Holidays in Palestinian Territory

Official national public holidays. Regional and religious observances may vary by area.

About Time in Palestinian Territory

Eleven Thousand Years of Continuous Settlement

Beneath the modern city of Jericho lies Tell es-Sultan, a mound of accumulated debris that archaeologists have identified as the site of the oldest continuously inhabited settlement yet discovered anywhere on Earth. The first permanent occupation there dates to roughly 9000 BCE, when Natufian hunter-gatherers began settling around a freshwater spring at the edge of the Jordan Valley, and by around 8000 BCE the community had grown sophisticated enough to raise the Tower of Jericho, an 8.5-metre stone structure with an internal staircase of twenty-two steps, among the oldest surviving monumental structures built by human hands anywhere in the world.

Excavations led by British archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon in the 1950s identified more than twenty distinct successive layers of settlement at the site, spanning roughly five broad cultural eras and revealing a community that had already mastered early agriculture, permanent mudbrick architecture and communal grain storage millennia before the invention of pottery or writing. The record is not entirely unbroken; at one point an earthquake appears to have disrupted the site's water supply, and archaeological evidence suggests the settlement stood empty for roughly 1,200 years before being reoccupied. Tell es-Sultan was formally inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2023, recognition of a settlement history now approaching twelve thousand years, nearly the entire span of the current geological epoch.

A Building Still in Use After Seventeen Centuries

Six miles south of Jerusalem, in Bethlehem, stands what historians generally regard as the oldest continuously used place of Christian worship anywhere in the world. Following a pilgrimage to the Holy Land by Empress Helena, mother of the Roman emperor Constantine, in 325 and 326 CE, construction began on a basilica over a cave venerated as the traditional site of Jesus's birth; the church was already being referenced by visitors as early as 333 and was formally dedicated on 31 May 339.

Constantine's original building did not survive intact. A fire, likely connected to the Samaritan revolts of the early sixth century, damaged the church sometime around 529, and the Byzantine emperor Justinian ordered it rebuilt on a larger scale; it is largely this sixth-century structure, with its five-aisled nave and cruciform sanctuary, that still stands today. According to a tradition recorded by multiple historians, the church survived the Persian invasion of 614 relatively undamaged because invading soldiers recognised the clothing worn by the Magi in a mosaic decorating its facade and spared the building as a result. Further additions followed during the Crusader period in the twelfth century, and portions of the original fourth-century mosaic floor, protected beneath later wooden flooring, can still occasionally be viewed today through specially installed hatches, a direct physical link to the building's earliest years nearly seventeen centuries ago.

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