Atlit Castle and Khirbet Karta

The day that we went to see the flamingos in Atlit we also took a walk along the beach to view the ruins of the Crusader fortress Château Pèlerin, also known as Atlit Castle. Built in 1218 by the Templars and taken over by the Mamluks in 1291, it was one of the largest fortresses in the Holy Land. The fortress was built on a promontory, with two main walls cutting the citadel off from the land and a protected harbour on the south side of the promontory. It also had three fresh water wells within its enclosure. 

Château Pèlerin was not demolished by the Mamluks, as was their normal practice after capturing a Crusader fortification. It in fact remained intact for several hundred years, until suffering damage in an earthquake in 1837.

Aaron Aaronsohn (a Jewish agronomist, botanist and head of the NILI espionage group) established an agricultural station at Atlit in 1911. Château Pèlerin became an important observation point used by the NILI spy team in transferring data to the British during World War I. The NILI spies would make contact with the British who would sail by. The British would send a small boat in to shore in the middle of the night to give gold coins to support the Jewish effort and in return would get detailed plans of Turkish movements. These interactions with the British Intelligence played a part in General Allenby's successful defeat of the Turkish army in Israel in 1917.
Today the fortress is an Israeli Navy base and the headquarters of the Shayetet 13 naval commando unit. As a result, it is within a closed military zone and we were only able to view it from the beach.

We were however able to explore the large Crusader cemetery south of the fortress. The cemetery dates from the 12-13th century and has more than 1,700 graves, above and below. Knights, pilgrims, residents and professionals working on the fortress were buried there and some gravestones are decorated with stylized patterns of crosses and icons indicating the status and profession of the deceased.

I read that the best place to view Château Pèlerin was from the viewing terrace at Khirbet Karta, so that was our next stop. We parked in the Limor picnic area, named after a member of the Genio family who founded the salt works in Atlit, and walked up to the viewing point which was once a British Mandatory water tower. The views of the salt ponds full of flamingos and other migrating birds, the Mediterranean Sea and Mount Carmel were wonderful. To the north we could see the ruins of Château Pèlerin and Le Destroit.

Le Destroit was a Crusader fortress which preceded Château Pèlerin. It was built sometime in the 1100s to protect Château Pèlerin and to secure the convoys that traveled along the sea. It was demolished by the Crusaders themselves about a century after its founding. The reason for this was the Crusaders' desire to avoid a Mamluk siege on the tiny fortress, which count not withstand it.

The Crusaders called Le Destroit Districtum and in French Destroit. The Hebrew name, Khirbet Karta, is related to the Hebrew churvan, meaning desolation or a destroyed place. Karta, which is taken from Aramaic and used today in modern Hebrew, means city, which this place does not really seem to have been.

Excavations inside the fortress and the surrounding area revealed water cisterns and the remains of clay pipes used to collect rainwater. To the north of the fortress are the remains of horse stables, below. There is a row of cavities, which were probably used for tying the animals. On the southern side of the stables, there is a row of sockets in the wall that were likely used to support the beams of a wooden roof that covered the place.

Further along we saw a guard booth hewn from sandstone and on the vertical, eastern quarried wall of the fortress, a large ancient inscription which has been cut into the rock. The letters are Phoenician script, probably the first two signs of the name of the Phoenician settlement.

Khirbet Karta is one of those sites that draws large groups of flower lovers every year, to view hundreds of blooming sea squills in one spot. Sea squills bloom at the end of August and September and into October each year, depending on the area and temperature. The blooming occurs earlier in the colder areas and later in the warm places. It just so happened that we visited Khirbet Karta back in October, when the flowers were in full bloom!
The sea squill is a common plant that stands out in the landscape. It is special due to its lifecycle and structure: its onions, its leaves, its flowers and its toxic materials. In November it grows leaves which last through the winter and early spring. By April the leaves wilt and all above-ground parts of the plant die. At the end of the summer a single flowering white pillar without any green leaves rises for just a few weeks. This can grow up to two meters high. The flowering begins from the bottom of the high flower pillar and every day another group of about 30 flowers opens above the previous ones, and the flowers that opened the day before wilt. The flower opens at night and remains open for approximately 18 hours.

The fact that the plant produces leaves in the spring and flowers in the fall is a way to survive the Mediterranean climate because the summers here are so hot and dry.

In Hebrew the sea squill is called Hatzav, from the root meaning "to chisel" because this hardy flower chisels itself into rock. The Jewish sages mentioned that Joshua used the sea squill to mark the borders of the Land of Israel. The plant's toxicity deterred people from digging up the bulbs to move the boundaries. The Egyptians referred to the sea squill as Ein Sit, the god who resists the sun, because it only blooms in the autumn.

The sea squill is one of the rare poisonous plants in Israel and one should not touch the bulbs without wearing gloves. It is related to the onion and, just as onions causes your eyes to burn when you chop them, sea squill leaves contain burning needle-like crystals. The flower was often used to protect graves in Arab cemeteries so that predators like wolves, jackals and hyenas wouldn't dig up the corpses. The flowers are thought of as messengers and are known as basl el maytin (bulb of the dead).

A folk saying across the Middle East and North Africa goes "The sea squill blooms and the summer ends". The sea squill may only bloom for a short period but it is one of the most beloved plants here in Israel. Children are taught to look out for it and the plant even has its own song, כמו חצב, written by Naomi Shemer, one of Israel's leading songwriters.

* This post has been shared on My Corner of the World, Little Things Thursday and Wordless Wednesday (on Tuesday).

Their Engagement Announcement

* This post was written before my son passed away.

A regular customer contacted me with a request for another card. Two of her workmates had just got engaged to each other. She sent me their engagement announcement and asked me to base my design on the photo of the couple. She also requested that I add the date they got engaged.

I carefully copied the photo of my customer's workmates, making sure to include the pattern on the bride-to-be's top and the stripes on her groom's shirt. Her hair was difficult since her light brown hair is darker at the roots but I managed to merge the two different colours of paper quite successfully.
I placed my portrait of the couple on a green background with a white frame, just like their own announcement. The flower was similar to one they had used too.

The Hebrew greeting on the card simply says "Mazal Tov Rivka and Michael". Mazal Tov literally means "good luck", though in practice the phrase is used to express "congratulations".
My customer was delighted. "Received the card. Beautiful as always. Thank you" she wrote to me.

* This post has been shared on The Good. The Random. The Fun.

A Flock of Flamingos in Atlit

I continued to look at Facebook after my son's death, even though many of my friends' posts irritated me. How could they be posting gleeful photos and writing such joyful things after what had happened? One by one I snoozed them but I remained on Facebook and took a little joy in the many wonderful photos I saw posted in the various nature groups I belong to.

In October I started to see photos of flamingos passing through Israel for the winter. Between moments of great sadness, I suggested to Mister Handmade in Israel that maybe we take a day off to go and see them for ourselves. It required an early get up - flamingos are more active in the morning and evening hours - and a good long drive to Atlit, a small town located on the northern coast, about 20 kilometers south of the city of Haifa. Though far from it being his ideal day out, he was willing to come with me.

Twice a year 500 million birds from 550 species including the flamingo, fly over Israel on their way back and forth from their nesting grounds in Europe and Asia. While a few hundred flamingos choose to stay here for the winter, most of the population passes through Israel and continues to Africa.

Israel has two places where the flamingos can find food. These are the saline pools in Eilat and Atlit. The saline pools in Atlit belong to the Salt of the Earth salt company. They were mined for the production of table salt.  The permission in principle "to produce table salt from seawater in Atlit" was given by the British as far back as October 1921. In a letter sent from Downing Street, Mr. Shuckburgh, Winston Churchill’s assistant, wrote: "From London's point of view, the matter is confirmed, and now permission is subject to the British High Commissioner, Sir Herbert Samuel."

The flamingos eat small shrimps, algae, small seeds, microscopic organisms, mollusks and other plants and animals that live in shallow waters. It sucks water through its sharp curved beak, which acts as a strainer and filters out the food. The saline pools in Atlit are large and shallow, which allows for the evaporation of salt water for the salt mineral industry. During this evaporation process, large amounts of pink species of algae and miniature crustaceans grow on the water. Flamingos love this pink delicacy and they get their pink colour from this food. The young flamingo is mostly grey in colour but while growing and feeding on pink crustaceans, its body metabolizes the pigments and turns the feathers pink. In fact, the name flamingo comes from the Portuguese or Spanish word flamengo, which means flame-coloured. 

The saline pools in Atlit and Eilat offer a unique ecological habitat for many species of waterfowl. Executives at Salt of the Earth noticed that many migratory birds were using their pools as nesting areas as they pass through the region, though the flamingo itself does not nest in Israel. Natural predators such as jackals, foxes and dogs were threatening these birds with extinction, so a program was launched to fence off islands in the saline pools to deter the predators.

As a side benefit, the protected islands also solved serious flooding problems caused by rising water levels in the saline pools, which took a severe toll upon the population of the little terns. Before these efforts, the terns' population had dwindled to a perilous low of just 300 pairs. Salt of the Earth has also installed observation cameras in nesting areas for continued research and monitoring.

While Atlit and Eilat are the main places in Israel to see flamingos, there have also been sightings at Kibbutz Nahsholim, Ein Afek and Agamon Hula.

After quite some time viewing the flamingos, we took a short walk on the beach to see the Crusader fortress Château Pèlerin, and then hiked at Khirbet Karta, to see the ruins of another Crusader fortress (all of which I will blog about in another post). On our way home we made a return visit to the Mishmar HaSharon Reservoir in the Hefer Valley to see the pelicans that come to spend time at the reservoir during the migration season.

The Mishmar HaSharon Reservoir is one of many water storage facilities built by the Jewish National Fund (JNF) in the Hefer Valley. The Vickar Observation Point, a large shaded balcony that rises above the reservoir, offers a wonderful view of thousands of great white pelicans and other birds in the reservoir.
Members of staff at the reservoir feed the pelicans with six tonnes of fish three to four times a week, during the three months that the pelicans are flying over Israel, all funded by the Ministry of Agriculture. Large flocks of pelicans used to cause immeasurable damage to local fish farms and were chased from one pond to the next, without being provided with an alternative food source. This exhausted some of the pelicans to the point of death. This "refueling station" at Mishmar HaSharon has been placed at the pelicans' disposal to provide them with enough food to allow them to continue their migration.

As with previous visits, it was a wonderful thing to see. Our day out in nature allowed us a little relief from what has been a horrendous few months.

* This post has been shared on Little Things Thursday