Scholars Decipher Ancient Graffiti In Room Of Jesus’ Last Supper (2025)

Biblical tradition holds that the Cenacle — a room on the upper floor of a Jerusalem building historically believed to stand above King David’s tomb — is where Jesus shared the Last Supper with his apostles before being crucified. As a result, many Christians consider the site holy and travel great distances to visit it.

With the help of technology such as ultraviolet and infrared filters and multispectral photography, a team of international researchers has now deciphered several dozen ancient inscriptions etched on the room’s walls between the 14th and 16th centuries. The marks include signatures, phrases and coats of arms, and they shed intriguing light on medieval pilgrims’ identities, and just how diverse they were.

“When put together, the inscriptions provide a unique insight into the geographical origins of the pilgrims,” said Ilya Berkovich, an Austrian Academy of Sciences historian and a co-author of a new article on the research published in Liber Annuus, a yearbook from Studium Biblicum Franciscanum. The Jerusalem research institute focuses on biblical studies, and particularly sites associated with the New Testament and early Christianity in the Middle East.

The graffiti reflects a centuries-spanning record left at the Cenacle by Armenians, Czechs, Serbs and numerous Arabic-speaking Eastern Christians.

Among the newly deciphered inscriptions, for example, is one in Armenian that reads “Christmas 1300.” An Arabic fragment reads “...ya al-Ḥalabīya,” a phrase that references the Syrian city of Aleppo. Based on the double use of the feminine suffix “ya,” the researchers conclude that a female Christian pilgrim chiseled the words, making it a rare material trace of a pre-modern woman pilgrim.

“At a time when research literature still tilts heavily to the experience of pilgrims from Western Europe, the Cenacle’s inscriptions are a valuable reminder of the diversity of the Christian pilgrim flow to late medieval Jerusalem,” reads the article, which describes the collaborative work of scholars led by Shai Halevi and Michel Chernin of the Israel Antiquities Authority.

The etchings reveal plenty of traces of European pilgrims, too, including the autograph, dating back to the 1400s, of a German pilgrim named Johannes Poloner, who later wrote a detailed account of his journey to Jerusalem. A 15th century heraldic coat of arms depicts the family crest of a nobleman from Styria, a state in Austria, and another coat of arms belonged to Adrian I von Bubenberg, a 15th century Swiss knight, military commander and mayor.

Even in cases where the inscriptions couldn’t be tied to a specific person, the researchers say they still provide material evidence of who the pilgrims were and where they came from.

While some parts of the inscriptions can be seen with the naked eye, others are too faint to detect. That’s where technologies such as multispectral imaging came in. The technique captures light across a range of spectral bands beyond what the human eye can see. During the team’s 2021 photographic effort to document all the inscriptions and graffiti on the walls of the Cenacle, the technique revealed writing and drawings whose colors had faded beyond recognition.

Why Did Pilgrims Write On Holy Walls?

Today, of course, it would be alarming to see the words “graffiti” and “church” in the same sentence, and those who deface historic sites often face legal consequences. But as verboten as tagging religious spaces is now, apparently it wasn’t unusual for the time.

“Graffiti in Western European churches was widespread since the latter 13th century,” the paper’s authors write. “In the last two generations, it has become a subject of lively research interest.”

The Cenacle — which has been destroyed and reconstructed many times — is located south of the Zion Gate within the walls of Jerusalem’s Old City. Most of the graffiti found there comes from the late Middle Ages, when the Cenacle became the heart of a Franciscan monastery whose monks assisted and guided Catholic pilgrims, though visitors of other faiths made their way to the sacred site.

While most of the deciphered inscriptions appear to have been scribbled quickly with a piece of coal or scratched with a penknife, the prominent position and high artistry level of other messages and drawings indicate that they were made with the full knowledge, if not the blessing, of the monastery.

In 1523, shortly after the Ottoman conquest, the Franciscans were expelled from the Cenacle, and it remained in Muslim hands until 1948. Echoes of this period can be seen in the site’s epigraphic content.

Islamic graffiti identified as part of the project includes an inscription, and a drawing of a scorpion, that honor the Sufi cleric Sheikh al-ʿAǧamī, who was appointed to serve as the first religious overseer of Ottoman Jerusalem. These engravings contribute to the layered spiritual and political history of the site, reflecting its significance across faiths and borders.