Beit Jibrin, Palestine: The Ancient Caves and a Depopulated Village's History

Beit Jibrin, Palestine (بيت جبرين) sits above roughly 800 caves cut into the soft chalk beneath it, carved out over so many centuries that the Romans once measured distances across the whole region from this one crossroads. The city they built here was large enough, in the year 200 CE, to be granted its own municipal charter and a new name, Eleutheropolis, City of the Free, by the emperor Septimius Severus. Almost two thousand years of continuous building sit beneath a modern village that no longer stands, the same long memory carried into FALASTIN's Palestinian Clothing collection.

Eleutheropolis: A Roman City of the Free

Long before Beit Jibrin was a Palestinian village, the site was Eleutheropolis, chartered by the emperor Septimius Severus in 200 CE. The name meant City of the Free, a status that came with real privileges inside the Roman province of Syria Palaestina.

It was not a minor outpost. Eleutheropolis covered roughly 65 hectares, larger than Roman-era Jerusalem, and sat at a junction where seven routes met, important enough that later geographers used it as the reference point for measuring distances to other towns in the region.

Bethgibelin, Palestine, and the Crusader Castle

After the Arab conquest of the seventh century, the Arabic name Beit Jibrin was used for the site for the first time. It returned to prominence under the Crusaders, when King Fulk of Jerusalem built a castle there in 1135 and, the following year, handed it to the Knights Hospitaller, who built the Frankish settlement of Bethgibelin around the fortress by 1168. Saladin captured and demolished the castle in 1187, ending its run as a Crusader stronghold, though the settlement and its name endured under the rulers who followed.

The Bell Caves Beneath the Village

What makes Beit Jibrin's underground landscape unusual is not one cave but a whole district of them, roughly 800 caverns quarried from the soft local chalk across centuries of use. About 80 of these are the bell-shaped caves the site is best known for, wide chambers narrowing to a single skylight opening at the top, carved for quarrying stone and then reused as burial grounds, animal shelters, workshops and spaces for raising doves. Both the caves and the ruins of Maresha and Beit Guvrin above them are listed today as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

What Was Beit Jibrin, Palestine, Like Before 1948?

By 1945 the Arab village built on this long archaeological record held 2,430 residents, almost all Muslim, farming 56.2 square kilometers of land that was overwhelmingly Arab-owned. A weekly souk brought buyers in from the surrounding towns to trade in grain, olives and the produce of the irrigated plots along the wadi, an ordinary market town built directly on top of a Roman free city and a Crusader castle neither it nor its residents had any particular reason to think about day to day.

The 1948 War and Depopulation

Israeli aircraft bombed Beit Jibrin on 19 October 1948, and the attack set off a panic flight among residents before any ground fighting reached the village itself. A UN-imposed ceasefire took effect on 23 October, but on 27 October troops from the Israeli Giv'ati Brigade occupied the village and its Mandate-era police fort anyway. The official depopulation date is recorded as 29 October 1948, the same autumn that emptied Al-Faluja a short distance to the southwest.

Kibbutz Beit Guvrin was established on the village's former lands in 1949, and the national park that now covers the site preserves the Roman, Byzantine and Crusader ruins beneath it while saying comparatively little about the Arab village that stood on the same ground into the autumn of 1948.

Lesser-Known Facts About Beit Jibrin

• Beit Jibrin was chartered as the Roman city of Eleutheropolis in 200 CE, a status it held as a free city larger than Roman Jerusalem.
• King Fulk of Jerusalem built a Crusader castle on the site in 1135, which Saladin destroyed in 1187 after capturing it.
• Of the roughly 800 caves quarried beneath the village, about 80 are the distinctive bell-shaped chambers that give the site its name today.
• The modern Arab village of Beit Jibrin had 2,430 residents and a weekly souk in 1945, three years before its depopulation.
• Kibbutz Beit Guvrin, founded on the village's lands in 1949, gave the whole site its modern Hebrew name.

A City Rebuilt on Itself, Then Erased

Few places in Palestine carry as many names stacked on top of each other as Beit Jibrin: Eleutheropolis, Bethgibelin, Beit Jibrin, Beit Guvrin, each one a different power's claim on the same hollowed hillside. What makes its erasure in 1948 different from the Roman and Crusader turnovers before it is that nobody renamed a living village this time. They emptied it, the way the people of Hebron, a half-day's walk southeast, kept living proof that a Palestinian city could outlast every empire that tried to rename it, and the way a key kept for a house no longer standing still names what was lost.

At FALASTIN, we aim to keep that heritage alive through our Palestinian Clothing collection.

100% of profits from FALASTIN are donated to the United Palestinian Appeal.

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