Beit Guvrin National Park
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How it came to be
Beneath the former towns of Maresha and Bet Guvrin, some 3,500 underground chambers are cut into the thick, soft chalk of the Judean Lowlands. At a crossroads of trade routes to Mesopotamia and Egypt, they were used for more than 2,000 years, from the 8th century BCE, when Maresha, the older town, was built, to the time of the Crusaders. The caves served as cisterns, oil presses, baths, dovecotes, stables, places of worship and hideaways, and as burial grounds on the edges of the towns.
Maresha was a town of Judah. After Judah fell in 586 BCE it became Idumean, and after Alexander's conquest in 332 BCE it was Hellenised under the name Marissa. The Hasmonean ruler John Hyrcanus captured it around 113/112 BCE, and in 40 BCE the Parthians destroyed it and it was abandoned. Nearby Bet Guvrin took its place and was refounded in the early 3rd century as the Roman city of Eleutheropolis.
In the necropolis a painted family tomb, the so-called Sidonian Tomb, carries an inscription naming 'Apollophanes son of Sesmaios, archon of the Sidonians at Marisa'. The site is now part of Beit Guvrin-Maresha National Park and was inscribed as a World Heritage site in 2014.
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