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For centuries, one of the holiest places in Christianity has been governed by an extraordinarily delicate balance of tradition, property rights, religious rivalry, and international diplomacy.
In this place, even the smallest physical change can carry enormous significance, and something as simple as moving an object can risk reopening disputes that date back hundreds of years.
The result is one of the strangest and most visible symbols of religious compromise and conflict in the world.
Learn more about the Immovable Ladder of Jerusalem on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
In 2009, I made my first visit to Jerusalem. I happened to be there during Holy Week, and I got to see the city in all its festive glory.
I made several visits to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, one of the most important churches in the world and one of its most fascinating buildings.
After I left Jerusalem, I began reading up on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which I had covered in a very early episode, and came across the story of the Immovable Ladder.
I didn’t remember seeing it when I was there, so I went back to my photos and, sure enough, there was the ladder in every photo I took of the outside of the building.
The ladder is just that. It is an old wooden ladder. It is said to have been made from Lebanese cedar, but no one really knows for sure.
It isn’t a metaphor. It had no symbolism, at least not initially.
The ladder sits on a stone ledge beneath one of the upper windows on the church’s facade, just above the entrance.
No one knows with certainty exactly who first put it there or precisely why. The most common explanation is that it belonged to Armenian monks who used the ledge outside their rooms.
Various accounts say it was used to reach the ledge to clean the windows, obtain fresh air, or transfer food and supplies. There are also traditions that monks used the window and ladder to avoid fees that Ottoman authorities sometimes charged for entering or leaving the church.
What we can establish with certainty is that the ladder was already there in the early 18th century. It appears in an engraving of the church made by the Franciscan friar Elzearius Horn in 1728.
It subsequently appears in David Roberts’s 1842 depiction of the church and in photographs from the 1850s onward.
So, why in the world is a wooden ladder sitting in the exact same spot for 300 years, at least?
To understand why, we first need a recap of what the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is and why it is so contested.
The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is traditionally believed to contain both Golgotha, the site of the Crucifixion, and the tomb of Jesus. There has been a church at the site since at least the 4th century, and it was probably a site of veneration well before that.
The cave where the tomb was supposedly located had long since been carved away, which makes it rather confusing when you visit.
The Church of the Holy Sepulchre was one of the central objectives of the Crusades. When Pope Urban II called the First Crusade in 1095, the recovery of Jerusalem and its holy places from Muslim rule was a major motivation.
After Crusaders captured Jerusalem in 1099, they took control of the church, renovated and expanded it, and made it the spiritual center of the Kingdom of Jerusalem.
Crusader kings were crowned there, and the church remained under Latin Christian control until Saladin recaptured Jerusalem in 1187, after which Eastern Christian communities were again granted greater access.
The Ottoman Empire took control of Jerusalem in 1517, when Sultan Selim I defeated the Mamluk Sultanate and incorporated the region into the Ottoman Empire. Jerusalem then remained under Ottoman rule for about 400 years, until British forces captured the city in December 1917 during World War I.
The Ottomans were Muslim, but they had a large number of Christians under their rule and maintained relations with other Christian European powers. They had no particular stake in the fight over the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, but they also didn’t want to upset any particular Christian sect.
During the Ottoman period, rights to the Holy Sepulchre repeatedly shifted between the Latin Catholics, represented primarily by the Franciscans, and the Greek Orthodox. Both sides appealed to Constantinople for decrees recognizing their rights, and European powers increasingly became involved.
France generally supported the Catholics, while Russia eventually became the great-power protector of Orthodox interests.
During the 17th and early 18th centuries, control could change depending on diplomatic pressure, political circumstances, and sometimes payments or influence at the Ottoman court.
The Franciscans gained particularly strong rights during this period. A French-backed arrangement gave Catholics control of important portions of the Holy Sepulchre, and in the early 18th century the Franciscans undertook substantial renovations.
This created enormous resentment among the Greek Orthodox.
A key event occurred around Palm Sunday in 1757.
The Greek Orthodox clergy and their supporters launched a violent takeover inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Contemporary Catholic accounts describe Orthodox participants attacking Franciscan installations, destroying lamps and decorations, and driving the Franciscans from parts of the church.
The confrontation wasn’t really a theological one, it was essentially a struggle over physical possession.
The attack succeeded. The Ottoman government intervened and issued a decree allocating control of the principal holy sites. The Greek Orthodox received greatly strengthened rights at the Holy Sepulchre, as well as important rights at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and the Tomb of the Virgin Mary.
The Armenians also retained substantial rights, while the Franciscans lost some of the privileged position they had previously enjoyed.
It was at least thirty years before the Palm Sunday event that the ladder first appeared. No one knows with certainty exactly who first put it there or precisely why.
When Ottoman authorities began defining who possessed which rights in the church, the basic principle increasingly became that existing physical arrangements were evidence of those rights.
That produced an odd result.
If an Armenian ladder was sitting on a particular ledge when the arrangement was recognized, removing it might imply that the Armenians had surrendered the right the ladder represented. Conversely, another community moving it might be interpreted as an assertion of authority over that section of the facade.
So, doing something as trivial as moving a ladder could potentially become a property dispute, which could then erupt into a religious conflict.
The safest solution, therefore, was to leave it exactly where it is.
This principle ultimately spread far beyond the ladder. A chair, lamp, door, floor tile, staircase, window, cleaning schedule, procession route, or repair could acquire legal and religious significance simply because changing it might alter the balance of rights.
The arrangement was not fully frozen in its modern form in 1757. The decisive formalization came almost a century later.
By the mid-19th century, disputes over the Christian holy places had become part of a much larger geopolitical confrontation. France under Napoleon III championed Catholic claims, while Tsar Nicholas I of Russia championed Orthodox claims.
France pressured the Ottoman Empire to restore Catholic rights that it argued had been guaranteed by earlier treaties. Russia insisted that the Orthodox rights established since 1757 be preserved.
The dispute became one of the major diplomatic disputes preceding the Crimean War.
To defuse the conflict, Sultan Abdülmecid I issued a decree in 1852 freezing the existing possession and worship rights at the Christian holy places. A related decree followed in 1853.
The principle was essentially that things would remain as they currently were.
Historian Marlen Eordegian describes the 1852 decree as freezing “the rights of worship and possession” of the Christian communities and recognizing the Orthodox position that had developed since 1757.
The arrangement was subsequently recognized internationally at the Paris settlement following the Crimean War and, more explicitly, in Article 62 of the Treaty of Berlin of 1878, which stated that no alteration could be made to the status quo in the Holy Places.
It became known as the Status Quo agreement.
The principal custodians were the Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic Franciscans, and Armenian Apostolic Church, with the Coptic, Syriac, and Ethiopian churches holding lesser rights.
The ladder is therefore not the reason the Status Quo exists.
The Status Quo exists because centuries of competition among Christian communities repeatedly produced diplomatic crises and sometimes physical violence. The 1757 confrontation established much of the allocation of rights, while the great-power confrontation involving France, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire led to the formal freezing of those rights in 1852.
The ladder just happened to be sitting there when everything froze, and it’s visible because it’s outside.
When Britain took Jerusalem from the Ottomans in 1917 and subsequently governed Palestine under the Mandate, it explicitly recognized the existing rights of the religious communities.
The British treated the Holy Places as a special legal category and generally refused to adjudicate theological or ownership disputes that might alter the established arrangement.
The British also tried to document exactly what the Status Quo meant in practice. One important result was the detailed study The Status Quo in the Holy Places, prepared by British official L. G. A. Cust and published in 1929.
It catalogued which denominations controlled particular chapels, doors, lamps, staircases, ceremonies, cleaning duties, and other rights. This became an important practical reference for administering the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and other disputed sites.
After the creation of Israel in 1948, the Old City itself was under Jordanian rather than Israeli control. That changed in June 1967, when Israel captured East Jerusalem and the Old City during the Six-Day War.
Both countries continued to enforce the Status Quo policy that began under the Ottomans and was continued by the British.
I should conclude by noting that the Immovable Ladder is really more of a metaphor. The ladder has been physically moved on several occasions, but it always causes controversy, and it is always put right back.
In 1997, a man removed the ladder through the window and hid it inside the church, apparently as a protest against the absurdity of the denominational dispute. It remained missing for several weeks before being found and returned. A grate was subsequently installed in the window.
On February 4, 2009, there is photographic evidence showing the ladder temporarily leaning beneath the left-hand window rather than its normal right-hand window, but it was soon moved back. The movement was probably connected with restoration work and scaffolding around the church.
There have been other minor cases of the ladder being moved, but because of the agreement and its implications, it is always put back.
Moreover, some people believe that the physical ladder itself is probably not the identical piece of wood depicted in the 1728 engraving. A wooden ladder exposed outdoors for nearly 300 years would probably have required repairs or replacement.
The Immovable Ladder is ultimately important not for what it is, but for what it represents. An ordinary wooden ladder became a symbol of centuries of rivalry, diplomacy, violence, compromise, and religious tradition.
It has been moved on occasion, and the wood itself may have been replaced, but its place above the entrance to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre has endured. In that sense, the ladder remains immovable because the agreement surrounding it has proven even harder to move.