The Virtual Illés Initiative is a groundbreaking, digital mapping legacy project that explores the multilayered histories of Jerusalem through a digitized model of a 3D relief completed in 1873.

All parties interested in collaborating are invited to contribute new documentation and artifacts, other elements of intangible culture, personal glimpses of the living city, and/or memorabilia, including diaries, letters, memoirs, and photographs.

These contributions will be used to annotate and animate the Virtual Illés Relief and to challenge conventional historiographical views constructed by the religious imagination, Orientalists, and settler colonialists.

Phase 1 focuses on the city during Ottoman rule and sets out to investigate Jerusalem’s rapid modernization within the context of global transformations at that time.

Interested in participating? Please introduce yourself via email: virtual.illes.initiative@gmail.com

The pilot project, The Mughrabi Quarter Virtual Archive, can be explored here: http://www.mughrabiquarter.info/

© ARCH Jerusalem 2020