Gethsemane, an olive grove on the lower slope of the Mount of Olives facing the Old City of Jerusalem, is where the Gospels place Jesus at prayer on the night of his arrest, and it is the quietest of the great Jerusalem sites.
The garden of the agony
The Gospels describe Jesus withdrawing to Gethsemane with his disciples after the Last Supper, praying in anguish that the coming ordeal might pass from him while his companions slept, and being arrested there after Judas' betrayal. The name means roughly "oil press", fitting for an olive grove. The scene, the agony in the garden, is among the most meditated moments of the Passion, and it is the reason pilgrims come to touch the rock at the site.
The Church of All Nations
The Franciscan Church of All Nations, built in the early twentieth century over the remains of earlier churches, stands at the traditional place of the prayer. Before its altar an outcrop of bedrock is left deliberately bare, held to be the rock on which Jesus prayed, and it is this that visitors reach out to touch. Ancient olive trees in the adjacent garden are pointed out to pilgrims, though no tree can be shown to date to the first century.
Many communions on one slope
Several Christian communions keep their own Gethsemane within a short walk: the Latin garden and church, a Greek Orthodox site, the Russian Orthodox convent of St Mary Magdalene with its gilded onion domes, and the Tomb of the Virgin below, venerated as the burial place of Mary. The result is less a single site than a hillside of parallel devotions, each tradition marking the same night in its own place, and it remains an active, and comparatively contemplative, place of Christian pilgrimage.