Lydda (al-Lidd): History of a Palestinian City and Its Heritage
A town has stood on the same low rise of the coastal plain, halfway between the sea at Jaffa and the hills of Jerusalem, for more than three thousand five hundred years. That town is Lydda, in Arabic اللد, al-Lidd, and it appears by name in the town list that Pharaoh Thutmose III had carved at Karnak around 1465 BCE. To speak of Lydda, Palestine is to speak of one of the oldest continuously named places on the coastal plain, a market town on the old Jaffa to Jerusalem road that Rome knew as Diospolis and that Palestinians have called al-Lidd for the whole of the Arab period. It sits inside the same long story of Palestinian heritage that runs through the land, the crafts, and the cities carried in memory out of it.
TL;DR
Lydda, in Arabic al-Lidd and in Hebrew Lod, is a Palestinian city on the central coastal plain, about 15 kilometres southeast of Jaffa on the historic road to Jerusalem. It is one of the oldest towns in the region, with settlement traces reaching into the Neolithic period and a written mention in Pharaoh Thutmose III's list of Canaanite towns around 1465 BCE. Rome and Byzantium knew it as Diospolis. It is the traditional home and burial place of Saint George, honoured in the Greek Orthodox Church of Saint George, which shares its ancient compound with the Mamluk-era Great Mosque of Lod. Lydda held the main railway junction of Mandate Palestine. In July 1948, during the Nakba, most of its Palestinian population was expelled during Operation Danny. Today Lod is a mixed city with a Palestinian community that has held its ground.
Where Is Lydda in Palestine?
Lydda lies on the central coastal plain of Palestine, roughly 15 kilometres southeast of Jaffa and about 40 kilometres northwest of Jerusalem. It sits on flat, fertile ground where the plain meets the low foothills, a natural stopping point on the ancient route between the coast and the interior.
That position is the whole reason the town matters. Any traveller, trader, or army moving between the port of Jaffa and the highland city of Jerusalem passed close to Lydda. The Arabic name al-Lidd carries the old Semitic root of the place, worn smooth by continuous use across the centuries. Lod, the Hebrew form readopted after 1948, comes from the same ancient root. Three names, one town, one piece of ground that has never emptied out.
The Names of al-Lidd: From Canaanite Town to Diospolis
The layers under Lydda run deep. Archaeologists have found pottery and settlement traces on and around the site reaching back into the Neolithic period, into the sixth millennium BCE. The first written record of the town is that Karnak list of the Pharaoh Thutmose III, around 1465 BCE, where it appears among the Canaanite towns of the coastal plain.
By the Roman period the town was well established, and around 200 CE the emperor Septimius Severus refounded it as a city under the name Diospolis, the city of Zeus. Under Byzantine rule it was a Christian centre with its own bishop. Then, from the seventh century onward, it became al-Lidd, an Arab town on the road, and it kept that name and that life through the Umayyad, Abbasid, Crusader, Mamluk, and Ottoman centuries. The town did not survive by being spared. It survived by being lived in, generation after generation, the way older inland cities like Nazareth did.
The Church of Saint George
Lydda is, above all else, the town of Saint George. The tradition holds that George, the fourth-century Christian martyr, was born to a family from the region and was buried here, and the town grew a shrine and then a church around his tomb. A Byzantine basilica with three aisles stood over the site between the fifth and seventh centuries, until it was destroyed in 614 during the Sasanian invasion.
The Crusaders rebuilt a cathedral on the same spot in the twelfth century, reusing the older Byzantine stone. After Saladin defeated the Crusaders at Hattin in 1187, the Lydda cathedral was pulled down in 1191. The building the town knows today, the Greek Orthodox Church of Saint George, was raised in 1872 over the eastern end of those medieval ruins, keeping two of the old apses. Inside it stands a sarcophagus venerated as the tomb of the saint. For Palestinian Christians, this is one of the oldest continuously honoured holy places in the country.
The Great Mosque and a Shared Compound
Beside the church, on the very same medieval footprint, stands the Great Mosque of Lod, also called the Al-Omari Mosque. It was built in 1268 under the Mamluk sultan Baybars, raised over the western part of the ruined Crusader cathedral. When the church was rebuilt in the nineteenth century, the Ottoman authorities set the plot so that part of it fed into the mosque courtyard. Church and mosque have shared one enclosure ever since, wall against wall.
That sharing is not an accident of crowding. In Palestinian tradition, Saint George is also al-Khadr, the Green One, a figure honoured by Muslims as well as Christians, tied to fertility, protection, and the renewal of the land. Pilgrims of both faiths have come to the same ground at Lydda for centuries. The compound is one of the clearest surviving pictures of the shared Muslim and Christian life that runs through Palestinian towns, the same layered devotion found across the country from Lydda to Jerusalem.
The Jaffa to Jerusalem Road and the Lydda Railway Junction
Because Lydda sat on the road, it also became the town of the rails. When the first railway in the region, the Jaffa to Jerusalem line, opened in 1892, it ran a station at Lydda. Over the following decades, as the British extended the network under the Mandate, Lydda grew into the main railway junction of Palestine, the point where the coastal and inland lines met and traffic was routed north and south. The junction made a market town into a hub.
Around the town spread the coastal plain, some of the most productive farmland in the country. Olive groves, citrus orchards, and vegetable fields fed Lydda and the markets beyond it. This is the same rootedness to land and harvest that carries through the story of the olive tree across the Palestinian hills. In Lydda the ground gave oil and oranges, and the railway carried them out.
What Happened in Lydda in 1948?
In the summer of 1948, during the war that Palestinians call the Nakba, the catastrophe, Lydda was one of the largest Palestinian towns still standing in the path of the advancing Israeli forces. Its population had swelled past 50,000 with refugees who had already fled Jaffa and other coastal towns.
Between the ninth and the thirteenth of July, Israeli forces took the town as part of Operation Danny, commanded by Yigal Allon with Yitzhak Rabin as operations officer. On the twelfth of July, dozens of Palestinians sheltering in the small Dahmash Mosque were killed, and estimates of the day's dead across the town run into the hundreds. That same day, an expulsion order for the population of Lydda and neighbouring Ramle was signed. Historians including Benny Morris have documented what followed: tens of thousands of residents were forced out on foot, eastward toward the Arab Legion lines, through summer heat that killed many of the weakest on the road. Between the two towns, an estimated 50,000 to 70,000 Palestinians were expelled. In Lydda, only somewhere between 700 and roughly a thousand people were allowed to remain. The Institute for Palestine Studies keeps a detailed record of those days.
This is stated plainly here because the record supports it. Homes emptied in an afternoon. A railway town of tens of thousands reduced to a few hundred of its own people. The map of who lived where was redrawn by force, and the town that had held its name for three thousand years lost almost all of the people who carried it.
What Is Modern-Day Lydda?
Modern-day Lydda is the city of Lod, inside the state of Israel, on the same coastal-plain ground it has always occupied. From 1948 onward, Jewish immigrants, many from Arab countries, were settled in the emptied houses, and the town was rebuilt around them. Lod today is a mixed city, home to a Palestinian community descended in part from the few families who stayed, alongside the population that arrived after 1948.
The heritage is still there to be read. The Church of Saint George and the Great Mosque still share their compound. The old town still remembers al-Lidd. The Palestinian residents of Lod, a minority in the city their grandparents built, keep the older name and the older story alive in the present tense, the way coastal and hill cities across Palestine have learned to do.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where is Lydda in Palestine?
Lydda, in Arabic al-Lidd, sits on the central coastal plain of Palestine, about 15 kilometres southeast of Jaffa and around 40 kilometres northwest of Jerusalem, on the historic road between the two. It is known today by its Hebrew name, Lod.
What is modern day Lydda?
Modern-day Lydda is the city of Lod in central Israel. It is a mixed city with a Palestinian community, part of it descended from the families who remained after the 1948 expulsion, living alongside the population settled there from 1948 onward.
What is Lod known for?
Lod, historic Lydda, is known as the traditional home and burial place of Saint George, honoured in the Greek Orthodox Church of Saint George that shares its compound with the Mamluk-era Great Mosque of Lod. It was also the main railway junction of Mandate Palestine.
What happened in Lydda in 1948?
In July 1948, during the Nakba, Israeli forces took Lydda in Operation Danny. Dozens were killed at the Dahmash Mosque on 12 July, and most of the Palestinian population of Lydda and Ramle, an estimated 50,000 to 70,000 people, was expelled eastward on foot. Only a few hundred residents were allowed to remain in Lydda.
Who is Saint George of Lydda?
Saint George was a fourth-century Christian martyr traditionally said to have come from the Lydda region and to be buried there. In Palestinian tradition he is also honoured as al-Khadr, the Green One, a figure venerated by both Christians and Muslims.
A Town That Keeps Its Names
Lydda is not just an old town on a road; it is a record of how many names one piece of ground can carry and still be itself. Canaanite town, Diospolis, al-Lidd, Lod. Church and mosque under one wall. A railway junction, an olive plain, and a summer in 1948 that emptied it and could not erase it. The old name is still spoken in the same streets, which is a quiet kind of continuity, and a stubborn one.
This article was written and fact-checked for FALASTIN by Jad Sahyoun, with the assistance of AI tools.
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