Eight ancient olive trees stand inside a fenced enclosure of roughly 1,200 square meters. That is the whole of it. 31.78°N, 35.24°E — the western foot of the Mount of Olives, just across the Kidron Valley from the eastern wall of Jerusalem's Old City. The verse from Mark 14 names the place, and the place is still here.
A Verse Before a Long Night
Mark 14 records what is in some ways the most concentrated scene of Jesus's life. After the Last Supper, he and the disciples cross the Kidron Valley and stop at a place the gospels name.
"And they came to a place which was named Gethsemane: and he saith to his disciples, Sit ye here, while I shall pray."
The Greek Gethsēmani is a transliteration of the Aramaic Gat Shemanim — oil press. The grove was a working agricultural site: olives picked from the surrounding trees were pressed there to extract the oil that lit the lamps and anointed the kings of Jerusalem across the valley. The place where the verse is set is the place where olives became oil. The image runs underneath the gospel scene; the agony in the garden is a man being pressed.
What the Olive Trees Are
The eight ancient olive trees inside the modern enclosure are remarkable specimens. In 2012, a team led by the Italian National Research Council took radiocarbon samples from sections of the trunks. Three of the eight tested produced dates between 1092 and 1198 AD. Olive trees, however, regenerate from their root systems indefinitely — a tree's visible trunk may be 900 years old while its root mass dates back much further. Some scholars argue the same root systems may have been here in the 1st century, even if the bark above ground is medieval. The disciples may not have leaned against the same wood, but they leaned against the same trees.
The Buildings Around It
The Church of All Nations (also called the Basilica of the Agony) sits beside the garden, completed in 1924 over the foundations of two earlier churches — one Byzantine (4th century), one Crusader (12th century). At the church's center is a section of bedrock traditionally identified as the rock on which Jesus prayed. The basilica's mosaic façade, designed by Giulio Bargellini, is one of the most photographed Christian images in the Old City. Just south, the small Greek Orthodox tomb of Mary and the Russian Orthodox Church of Mary Magdalene complete the cluster.
How the Site Survived
The Mount of Olives has been the most consistently identified Christian site in Jerusalem since at least the 4th century, when Constantine's mother Helena and the early Christian pilgrim Egeria described visiting it. Mention of the olive trees as objects of veneration goes back to the Byzantine period. The current enclosure dates to the Franciscan custody after the 14th century. Across all the changes of regime — Byzantine, Persian, Arab, Crusader, Mamluk, Ottoman, British, Jordanian, Israeli — the olive grove has remained an olive grove. The verse anchored a piece of ground that nobody felt entitled to plow.
Gethsemane Today
Visitors approach by walking down from the Old City through the Lions' Gate or by climbing up from the Kidron Valley. The garden enclosure is open to view but not to walk through; the trees are protected. The basilica is open daily, with the Roman Catholic Hour of the Agony observed on Holy Thursday — pilgrims keeping watch in the place the verse names. Mark 14:32 is one of the few New Testament verses whose geography you can check by leaning over a fence.
Write It Out
Copy what he says to them out for yourself. Sit ye here, while I shall pray. By the time you finish it, you notice the only instruction anyone else gets that night is to stay put. Not to help, not to watch the gate — to sit. Mark names the place first, in the same breath: a working olive press, a farm address that existed before the night did. The hardest job in the garden went to the people who had nothing to do.
The verse named a press. The trees still press. The ground has not moved.