In the late-nineteenth century, a bookbinder from Bratislava named Stefan Illés relocated to the city of Jerusalem in Ottoman Palestine. There he produced what came to be known as the Illés Relief, a miniature three-dimensional model of his adopted city. In an age of ever-expanding colonial interests in the region and popular curiosity about the Holy City, the Illés Relief toured Europe to great fanfare, leading interested parties in Geneva, Switzerland to arrange its purchase and permanent display in the city, which had been cast by Jean Calvin as the “Protestant Rome.” Presently, the Illés Relief is on view in the Tower of David Museum in Jerusalem, nominally on loan since 1984 but without a defined return date. The following is an interview with the art historian and founder and director of ARCH Jerusalem, Maryvelma O’Neil. Our conversation moves from the history and trajectory of the Illés Relief to her own digital humanities work stemming from the Relief, specifically the Virtual Illés Relief Initiative and the Mughrabi Quarter Virtual Archive.Footnote ^{1 ,} Footnote ² Although the themes of the interview, memory and cultural heritage, suggest agents and events long past, as our conversation reveals, these issues remain relevant today, in the ongoing disposition of Palestinians and destruction of Palestinian life and culture.

Ghayde Ghraowi: What can you tell us about Stefan Illés and this object he produced?

Maryvelma O’Neil: Stefan Illés, son of an official municipal secretary in Pressburg (now Bratislava), was baptized on 2 October 1839 in the Cathedral of St. Martin. Twenty-five years later he was identified as a Hungarian bookbinder who was a guest for a fortnight at the Austrian Hospice in Jerusalem (7 to 23 November 1864). On 26 July 1871, he received a pilgrim’s certificate from the hospice.

The Illés Relief of Jerusalem is a miniaturization—albeit an extruded, three-dimensional one—of what was then the regional seat of the Ottoman administrative district, known as the Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem. It was commonly referred to as Palestine, an independent province since 1872. A card affixed to the relief displays his signature and the completion date of 1873.

In contrast to two-dimensional classical cartography, the Illés Relief (scale 1:500, roughly 15 by 16 feet or 4.5 by 5 meters) was made in three dimensions from zinc sheets and mounted on a frame built in eight parts for transportation and display. It offers an immediate three-dimensional aerial vision of the Holy City and environs as they appeared in 1873. The relief is an intricately detailed rendering of the stony hill fortress of Jerusalem, set on a promontory, bordered by mountains and enveloped by deep valleys. Promoters claimed scientific veracity, although some inaccuracies in scale have been observed.

Illés quite deliberately color-coded his relief to differentiate between Old and New Jerusalem. Ancient Jerusalem limestone structures were painted gray in contrast to modern consular and religious buildings that are straw yellow. Modern roads leading outside the Ottoman walls were marked white; roofs of significant religious monuments were colored red and metal domes black. Key semiotic details, such as new consular flags, as well as recently installed telegraph poles to Istanbul outside Jaffa Gate (1865), were included. The Palestinian village of Silwan is seen, as well as the extension of the modern city extra muros: Mishkenot Shaʾananim, the first modern Jewish neighborhood, the Russian complex, and the new Arab dwellings.

GG: With such careful detail, I’m wondering how Illés, a bookbinder by trade, could have undertaken this project.

MO: Illés was well-acquainted with the coterie of foreigners who had arrived in Jerusalem during the second half of the nineteenth century to explore, survey, and document Palestine: amateur biblical archaeologists, missionaries, cartographers, and model makersFootnote ³. Only French diplomat and archaeologist Charles-Jean Melchior de Vogüé (1829–1916) had formal training. However, others transformed themselves into specialists on the ground. By dint of hard work and immense curiosity they acquired deep knowledge of local archaeology, the topography of Jerusalem, and the histories of architecture. Among the most significant were Conrad Schick (1822–1901), German missionary, archaeologist, carpenter, and model maker, who settled permanently in Jerusalem in 1846 until his death in 1901, and Titus Tobler (1806–1877) the “Father of German Exploration in Palestine,” who mapped Jerusalem in 1858.Footnote ⁴ Carl Sandreczki (1810–1892), an Arabic-speaking German missionary, is barely known. He was a researcher in Jerusalem for two decades (1851–1872). In 1865 he undertook a highly original toponymy of the city.

Upon the recommendation of the Austrian consul in Jerusalem to Ottoman officials, master model maker, Schick, and Illés prepared small preliminary models of Jerusalem for exposition at the Vienna World’s Fair (1873). The Illés Relief overshadowed Schick’s smaller wooden model of the Noble Sanctuary (al-Aqsa Mosque, or al-Haram al-Sharif); it was the centerpiece of the Ottoman Pavilion, the largest non-European exhibition space.

GG: What happened to the Illés Relief after 1873? And how did you come across it?

MO: Nearly eight million people visited the World’s Fair, where the Illés Relief apparently caused quite a sensation; countless spectators viewed it during the European tour (1873–1878). The high value accorded the model in Switzerland is evident from the sum fetched: On 26 October 1878, the city of Geneva purchased it for 9,500 Swiss francs, the equivalent of roughly 250,000 US dollars today. There is intriguing anecdotal mention of Illés’s activity following the sale.

Illés returned to Jerusalem, where he crafted two more models of Jerusalem, smaller than the original relief, and apparently of greater sophistication. Their current locations are unknown. Illés’s “Brief description of two geographical stereograms of Biblical Jerusalem at the time of Christ and present-day Jerusalem” was published in Hanover (1881).Footnote ⁵ Research in the Ottoman Imperial Archives in Istanbul, the Austrian State Archives, the Archive of the University of Vienna, and in Bratislava has not as yet yielded information about Illés’s life, model making, or stereograms.

During my first visit to the Tower of David Museum (2010), I followed a sign that indicated the presence of a relief of Jerusalem. After descending many steps, I came upon it in a dark cistern with no curatorial information except for its provenance—Geneva, where I live—and names of the locals who had been involved in its transfer to Jerusalem.

GG: The question of provenance is always a fascinating, if inevitably fraught, one. Have you looked further into Geneva’s relationship to the artifact?

MO: Back home, I began research in the University of Geneva Library and set out to locate the owners, the Maison de la Réformation S.A. I also met with a number of politicians and cultural chiefs to solicit interest in repatriating it.

Having realized that there was no will to mobilize its return in the face of Israel’s cultural politics, our NGO, ARCH Jerusalem, engaged the Factum Foundation to make a virtual copy of it. However, an article I had written in Al-Jazeera (2012) clearly irked the curator who had promised to dismantle the relief and place it in a more luminous place for this photogrammetry process, but the promise was not honored.Footnote ⁶ The Factum Foundation team worked as well as they could under these circumstances and delivered an enormous amount of data.

GG: Do we know anything about why the Maison de la Réformation decided to loan the Relief? Do we know anything about the conditions of the loan?

MO: Gustave Moynier, cofounder of the International Community of the Red Cross (ICRC), spearheaded the initiative for its purchase. Two appeals were launched in April 1878. Money flowed in from more than a hundred private donors, many from distinguished families. Within the month, 5,000 Swiss francs had been raised, much by public subscription from a wide social spectrum. The administrative council of the Société de la Rive Gauche contributed an additional 4,500 francs, thereby permitting the purchase of the model for 9,500 francs. The remainder was designated for installation of the relief in the Calvin Library on the first floor of the Maison de la Réformation S.A., where it was displayed to the public twice a week. After more than thirty years the space was needed and the model was moved several times, then housed in the attic of Geneva’s Museum of Art and History.

When an Israeli student tracked it down, her well-placed father, David Littman, succeeded in convincing the leaders of the Maison de la Réformation to send it on permanent loan to the Tower of David Museum in Jerusalem. The loan contract (signed on 20 September 1984) specified that it was to be “accessible to the public and to researchers.” It was to be returned to its rightful owners after ten years, with transportation costs paid by the Israeli museum. However, a demand for its return had to be made two years in advance. If no request was made, the loan was renewable every five years. Every two years a brief report was to be made for the owners on its condition.

However, there was some consternation expressed about the loan by top Geneva officials. On 18 October 1984, Geneva Mayor Roger Dafflon and the Secretary General, Jean-Pierre Guillermet, wrote on behalf of the Administrative Council to Michel-Pierre Micheli, President of the Maison de la Réformation S.A.:

A letter from Littman to Micheli was quoted in an article that appeared in Le Matin Dimanche (22 October 1984):

GG: Has anything changed with regard to the Relief’s exhibition since you first saw it in 2010? You mentioned that at the time it was hardly on display and hidden away in a cistern. What does this tell us about cultural heritage and accessibility?

MO: For nearly forty years (1984–2023) the relief was located in a dark cistern deep in the labyrinthine complex in West Jerusalem, without curatorial content. In June 2023, following renovation, it was moved to a gallery on the first floor. Apart from eight interactive tablets that focus on major monuments and a reel of nineteenth-century photographs projected on the back wall, there is no exploration of the geopolitical and social complexities of Jerusalem during the late Ottoman era that was “a shared field of social and political interaction and contestation.”Footnote ⁹

The Illés Relief remains inaccessible to most Palestinians, who are prohibited from gaining permits to enter Jerusalem due to Israeli sovereignty, enacted through military occupation. This contravenes the human right to take part in cultural life, which is widely recognized in human rights instruments, in particular in Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Article 15, paragraph 1 (a), of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

Still frame from the Virtual Illés Relief Initiative courtesy of Maryvelma O’Neil and Andrew Yip.

GG: I’d like to ask about the Virtual Illés Relief Initiative itself. What are the constituent parts of this digital project? What can users expect from the application experience? What do you want users to come away with? Perhaps I’m anticipating your answer here, but I also want to hear about how you connect the Illés Relief to the history of the Mughrabi Quarter.

MO: For the longue durée of almost eight centuries, the Mughrabi Quarter of Jerusalem was home to Arabs from North Africa, Andalusia, and Palestine. However, within two days after the Six Day War (10–12 June 1967), the historic neighborhood, located in the city’s southeast corner near the western wall of the Noble Sanctuary (al-Haram al-Sharif), was completely wiped off the physical map by the State of Israel, in flagrant violation of Article 53 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which stipulates:

Two decades prior to the Mughrabi Quarter demolition, Jerusalem’s designation as a “corpus separatum” had been intended to depoliticize the city through internationalization, under a special regime to be administered by the United Nations, as confirmed in UN resolutions 181 (1947) and 194 (1948). Two centuries earlier, the so-called Status Quo arrangement for holy places had been codified by Ottoman decrees to negotiate conflict between and among different religions and religious groups over shared or contested religious sites. These legal obligations guaranteed all faiths access to their holy sites and the right to consent to any change, either in procedure or substance. Although sovereignty over Christian holy sites was of primary concern, the Status Quo embraced the Western Wall (claimed by Jews as the Kotel and by Muslims as al-Buraq), where Jewish challenges to the Status Quo began in the late Ottoman era and continued to escalate during the 1920s, culminating in the deadly riots of 1929.

The Status Quo was breached with the destruction of the Mughrabi Quarter and decisively inaugurated a still ongoing Zionist program to establish illegal “facts on the ground” in East Jerusalem—“facts” that concomitantly stripped the quarter of communal assets (awqāf) in order to expand the Jewish Quarter to four times its pre-1948 boundaries. Recent scholarship has investigated the systematic destruction and appropriation of non-Jewish heritage that the demolition initiated. New documentation and interpretation of the immediate and the long-term impact of the Mughrabi demolition are advancing a very vital discussion. This discourse is of critical urgency, given Israel’s master plans to further “Judaize” the city, including illegal excavations and tunneling in progress that gravely threaten the structural integrity of the Noble Sanctuary at the heart of Jerusalem. Organized provocations to the Status Quo agreement at al-Aqsa Mosque along with the Israeli government’s construction plans for the area and heated debate about control of the Mughrabi Ascent, which provides access to the Noble Sanctuary for non-Muslims, further exacerbate the tense conflict.

The Mughrabi Quarter may have been physically obliterated in 1967, but it remains intact—albeit in miniature—as part of the Illés Relief. The photogrammetric recording created in 2019 is of great intrinsic value because it has digitally preserved a rare historical artifact of outstanding universal cultural value. The Illés Relief has been made available online to a global audience in the form of an interactive digital replica for unhindered investigation and exploration.

The Virtual Illés Relief Initiative began with the digital recovery of the Mughrabi Quarter through a virtual archive. Multimedia documents, especially photographs and maps, are fleshed out through interviews of Jerusalemites native to the quarter, who experienced the trauma of its ethnic cleansing. It is website accessible, enabling visitors to visually explore the destroyed quarter through screen-based visualization.

GG: Through the Mughrabi Quarter Virtual Archive your project also provides users with documentation of the neighborhood in the form of photographs, cartographical references, and interviews with former residents.Footnote ¹¹ Can you describe the process of collecting and organizing these materials? Did you work with local institutions, collections, researchers, or community members? Community is foundational to this project. So, I’m particularly interested in how you have been able to connect with what remains of the Mughrabi Quarter at the same time as you are building this international community of users and learners trying to grasp its history.

MO: The process of collecting and organizing materials about the demolished Mughrabi Quarter was quite challenging for a number of reasons. The first impediment: it was ripped out. “The works undertaken on this site of the Old City … have given it the appearance of a gaping wound in the flesh of the City,” lamented René Maheu, sixth director-general of UNESCO.Footnote ¹² The “Expansion and Development of the Jewish Quarter” project, a euphemism for a systematic settler-colonial policy, proceeded to appropriate a total of four Palestinian neighborhoods.

The hunt for photographs was somewhat limited due to the fact that western visitors prioritized parts of the city in which Christian monuments were located. Many of the photographs and maps of the destroyed Mughrabi Quarter were accessed, thanks to the help of Jean-Michel de Tarragon OP, then curator of the photograph archive of the École biblique et archéologique française de Jérusalem. Fortunately, Armenian photographic stores in Jerusalem yielded pictures. Others were tracked down in European and American collections and by word of mouth.

Members of the Mughrabi community still in Jerusalem and others in the Occupied Palestinian Territories brought the quarter alive with their accounts of community life. With the help of a local Palestinian photographer, filmed interviews were undertaken. Many are very poignant, among them the accounts of the former mukhtar and his wife who fled with their young family, including a sister who suffered from epilepsy and was deeply traumatized.

In 2018 I visited the late Muhammad ʿAbd al-Jalil ʿAbid al-Mawludi al-Mughrabi in the family apartment on the top floor of the Zawiya ʿUmar al-Mujarrad al-Masaʿudi (al-Mughrabi Court) on Ha-Kotel Street, which originally belonged to his grandfather. The intimate vaulted chamber hosts a small museum of memory dedicated to the Mughrabi Quarter: its walls were lined with family documents, old photos of the quarter and its residents, as well as many historical books on Arab Jerusalem.

It is hard to gauge who has accessed the Mughrabi Quarter Digital Archive as limited funding has made it difficult to make known its existence. To do it full justice, we have begun the process of placing the Mughrabi Quarter on the UNESCO List of Destroyed Cultural Heritage Sites.

GG: You have been describing extensive historiographical and ethnographic work to reconstruct the Mughrabi Quarter. This work is necessary to challenging the erasure of the Palestinian past. But memory and history are not all that are at stake here. How do these projects help reflect the ongoing nature of the Israeli settler-colonial project? As the late Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury used to say, the Nakba is “continuous.”

MO: The Virtual Illés Relief Initiative and the Mughrabi Quarter Virtual Archive can serve as sites of remembrance of Palestinian life in Jerusalem from the Ottoman Period to the Nakba and the Naksa and their aftermath. The Mughrabi Quarter, established in 1187 CE, was destroyed in two days, between 10 June and 12 June 1967, and transformed into the so-called Western Wall Plaza, the preeminent site of ethnonationalist rites. An iconic photo of a handful of young men in the Paratroopers Brigade framed by the Western Wall, taken on 7 June 1967, became a propaganda piece. Since then, the link between the Western Wall, the Jewish people, and the Israeli state has been emphasized time and time again when swearing-in ceremonies for new IDF recruits are held. Annual ceremonies for Israel’s fallen soldiers take place there.

The same forces of dispossession continue today at varying intensities. The Illés Relief shows areas of Jerusalem outside the Ottoman Walls that have become targets for Israel’s plans to solidify Jewish Israeli sovereignty in East Jerusalem by dispossessing Palestinians in the Old City basin, which includes the Muslim Quarter and surrounding Palestinian neighborhoods such as Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan.

Digital activism is a force to be reckoned with. Palestinian organizations, entrepreneurs, business owners, and activists increasingly use digital and online technologies to showcase their work and identity. As Mayss Al Alami writes, “in surpassing the stereotypical narratives of mainstream media, Palestinians have created online spaces through which their identity and craft are showcased beyond the occupation under which they live. From online virtual reality (VR) tours, to social media profiles, online stores, and forums, Palestinians are part of the online digital revolution that is expanding the present digital and virtual world.”Footnote ¹³

Still frame from the Virtual Illés Relief Initiative courtesy of Maryvelma O’Neil and Andrew Yip.

GG: You mention Sheikh Jarrah, a neighbor that is under immediate threat. It is facing the same fate as the Mughrabi Quarter.

MO: Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah are also deeply engaged in narration of their perilous existence. The neighborhood that now numbers 3,000 grew from a former olive grove located directly north of the Damascus Gate. It was settled after Salah al-Din’s conquest of Jerusalem in the twelfth century. Hussam al-Din, named al-Jarrahi, or doctor, was the physician to Salah al-Din. Muslims remember him for the Sufi zāwiya (lodge) he founded, and they venerate his tomb. Sheikh Jarrah also became an important site of communal visitation for Jews who honored the tomb of Shimon HaTzadik (Simeon the Just), a venerated Jewish priest who lived during the period of the Second Temple (516 BCE–70 CE). It is located adjacent to the Cave of the Minor Sanhedrin in the Shimon HaTzadik settlement.

In 1967 Israel illegally occupied East Jerusalem, including Sheikh Jarrah, which remains under de facto Israeli control. Palestinian families were evicted from the neighborhood for the first time in 2009, and replaced by Jewish families. Since then, Israeli settler organizations have claimed ownership of the land in Sheikh Jarrah and have filed multiple successful lawsuits to evict Palestinians from the neighborhood. This is part of a grandiose settlement strategy called the “Holy Basin,” which involves the establishments of settler units, a string of theme parks named after places and figures from the Hebrew Bible, and hotels that will be combined to form a tight noose around the Old City of Jerusalem. The plan requires the forced displacement of Palestinians in the city, which has long been underway.

However, the matrix of control that seeks to secure dominance and solidify Jewish identity is no longer done sub rosa; their nefarious actions are exposed to the world. It has been described as a microcosm of the Israeli–Palestinian disputes over land since 1948. In May 2021 Palestinian families under eviction orders in Sheikh Jarrah rose up in protest. Palestinians across Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories held their own protests in solidarity, fueled by their shared experience of military occupation, dispossession, and fragmentation. In response, Israeli forces injured, arrested, and detained thousands. But the heavy-handed crackdown did not deter young Palestinian activists, who were joined by many international supporters. The visibility of the sustained solidarity movement successfully publicized Israel’s illegal policies of settlement expansion in the heart of East Jerusalem. For instance, Forensic Architecture has built a three-dimensional interactive platform that narrates the Israeli policies and practices in Sheikh Jarrah and the protracted struggles of its Palestinian residents. It documents the apartheid policies that aim to displace Palestinians at the level of the street, the neighborhood, the city, and on the land more broadly.

GG: Can the Illés Relief tell us anything about other Jerusalem neighborhoods like Sheikh Jarrah?

MO: When the Illés Relief was completed, Silwan and Sheikh Jarrah were farming villages that were linked to Jerusalem. Since 1873 the city has been damaged by natural disasters, divided by war (in 1948 and 1967), scarred by the destruction of cultural heritage,Footnote ¹⁴ diminished by closure of Palestinian cultural and intellectual societies, deliberately placed in “development limbo,” cut off from ecological, economic, and social relationships with surrounding villages, made fragile by ideological archaeology, significantly altered in character by illegal expansion and military occupation, weaponized by urban planning, and monetized as a for-profit, Disney-esque tourist destination. Since 1982 the “Old City of Jerusalem and Its Walls” have been inscribed on UNESCO’s List of World Heritage in Danger. By contrast, Illés’s model shows the historic landscape around the Ottoman walls that was just being developed, which is now the subject of intense pressure for building of new Israeli settlements. The model provides us with rare data for evaluation of these modern changes.

The situation is dire. Civil society in Jerusalem is well aware of the discriminatory planning policies: internal colonizing by settlers, land appropriation, home demolition, unfair building restrictions, lack of sufficient public services (water, trash collection) and infrastructure, Orwellian control over residential rights and permits, and construction of the Wall of Apartheid with concomitant land appropriations. In the face of it all, they remain rooted, productive, and protective of Palestinian identity.

Still frame from the Virtual Illés Relief Initiative courtesy of Maryvelma O’Neil and Andrew Yip.

GG: What about the future of the initiative? Do you have a vision for where to take this project? I can already see it as an invaluable teaching tool at universities, and in collaborations with more public-facing organizations and institutions.

MO: In making the richly annotated Virtual Illés Relief globally accessible through digital humanities methodologies, scholars, cultural heritage organizations, students, and the public will be encouraged to actively engage in digital dialogue with the people and events that shaped the social spaces of Jerusalem’s living past. Hopefully, this will inspire original research as well as state-of-the-art digital initiatives and global alliances to protect and preserve cultural heritage of outstanding universal value.

Through rich multimedia content, four-dimensional projection, three-dimensional printed models, and augmented reality (AR), we will formulate and reformulate the multiple histories of Jerusalem in a museum context. This immersive installation within a curated exhibition will fully engage participants around the world in the past, present, and future of Jerusalem. Hopefully, by inviting them to experience emotions of awe, aura, and authenticity, they will become advocates for its protection from the Holy Basin settlement strategy and transformation into a Jewish destination for tourism, higher education, and high tech.