On a Galilean mountaintop, in about 1150, King
Baldwin III stopped grousing at his mother, Queen Melisende of
Jerusalem, and built a castle in the village of Mi’ilya, from which he
sought to consolidate his shrunken share of the Frankish Crusader
kingdom in the Holy Land. Almost 900 years later, residents of this
village have come together in a unique venture spearheaded by a local
archaeologist, to fix and restore the dangerously crumbling castle. In
parallel, next door to the castle, a curious gas-station owner named
Salma Assaf privately funded an excavation beneath her house – leading
to the discovery of what may have been the biggest winery in the
Crusader world.
Unique in the annals of
medieval winemaking, this winery had not one treading floor where the
grapes were crushed, but two parallel ones, which apparently drain into a
huge pit carved out of bedrock back in the Roman period.
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