The city of mosaics: Madaba

This is going to come down as one of the best sleep of this entire trip. I credit this to the temperature and an early bed time. We are really refreshed and ready to start the day.

Madaba is famous for its mosaics. Many of which are of the byzantine time and inside very old churches and monasteries.

We get to the visitor center parking, which is right into town and at the visitor center itself you can find a well done map with a walking trail leading to all the spots and archeological sites. It's very well done.

We start by the archeological park which group a few old churches and what is left of the decamus, the roman city main street.

The mosaics are beautiful and explanations are all around. I particularly liked the superposition of various times.

The best example is the virgin mary church, where yoi can see mosaics from a roman house, on top a church was built and the mosaics are byzantine and then the Ayyubins have renovated part of the church and it's a clear Islamic style mosaic.

The next step is the burnt palace and the martyr church. The palace has the nicest floors. The martyrs church has suffered during the iconoclast period and all animals and people representations have been scraped off the mosaic. But the few saved parts are beautiful.

We continue along the street to see the most famous church, called St George church. It's said to have the oldest mosaic map in the world. It's under complete renovation and everything has been stripped bare inside except for the famous floor. It's a little underwhelming and I was more impressed at the floors we have seen in the archeological park.

We continue on to the church of jean the Baptiste. This one was quite interesting because you can walk in the tunnels below. It's a surprising maze of walls and arches, some of which dating from the roman time. It's clear all the succession of building on top of each others, and it goes deep !

Then, we go up into the bell tower. The tiny metallic stairs are extremely narrow. We walk through even in the way between the bells and avoiding the cords that can be used to ring them. I don't think I have ever been so close to bells. The parapet around the top is barely the length of my foot and a white balustrade circles it. It's that narrow that you walk sideways slowly around, enjoying an impressive view of the city.

The visitor center of the church has some interesting photography of Madaba in the early 1900's. And the change in 100 years to today is insane. It used to be really just a couple of stone houses with shepherds living here. There is also a good size reconstitution of the mosaic floor of the church of St lot.

After this quite interesting visit, we continue along the official walking loop to the cathedral, which was closed, and then the church of the Apostles. This last one had some very well preserved floors and a unique representation of the sea as a woman.

Time to get lunch. Our host had recommended a couple of restaurant, and we just picked the closest one : harit jdadoun.
It's a touristic one, but the food was excellent. We had a long relaxed meal, stocking up on some warmth.

We are done with the downtown visit and lunch at 2pm. This took a good 4 hours of visit this morning and lunch. We decide to go and see the church of st lot, since we have seen it mentioned many time.

It's on the way to Mt Nebo. We drive there and end up on a tiny road, wondering if the church can actually be visited... Turns out yes, there is a guardian who opens up the padlock of the church when we arrive. They must not see many visitors.

The inside is very small, but the mosaics are superb. Almost everything is intact. And the real one is just as nice as the reconstitution we saw earlier. Plus there are more than the central nave floors to see. It's a small site, and it takes 10min to visit.

If you haven't, that would be good to drive up to Mt Nebo now, but since we have already visited it yesterday, we go back to the hotel.

After a couple of hours of downtime, we find a nearby burger joint for diner. That concludes a good day.