Photo Every Day 2026

I took this photo while standing just outside of the Old City walls of Jerusalem. These walls were built sometime between 1537 and 1541 by the Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, largely on the line of much older fortifications. For roughly three centuries before that. Around the year 1219, the city walls were deliberately dismantled so Crusaders couldn’t reuse them.

Legend says Suleiman was spurred by a dream in which lions attacked him for neglecting the holy city, and that he later had the architects executed for leaving Mount Zion outside the circuit. The second story is almost certainly false—Mount Zion had already lain outside the walls for centuries—but both tales are still told by guides today.

If you look a little closer, you can see hundreds of small holes and marks across the face of the wall. These are actually (mostly) bullet impacts and shrapnel scars from the fighting of 1948 and 1967. The heaviest concentration of bullet holes and marks like this is at Zion Gate on the southern wall. During the 1948 war, Israeli forces blew open the gate in a desperate attempt to relieve the besieged Jewish Quarter inside the Old City. The gate and the surrounding masonry were riddled with hundreds of bullet holes in the close-range fighting; some bullets remain embedded in the stone. The scars were deliberately left unrepaired during later restorations so they would remain visible. Locals and guides sometimes call this the “Wounded Gate.”