Within its sixteenth century Ottoman walls, the Old City of Jerusalem, barely a square kilometer, is conventionally divided into four quarters: Jewish, Christian, Muslim and Armenian. The division is more a matter of living neighborhood than of tidy border, since the Christian and Muslim quarters in particular interleave shrines belonging to communities that have prayed within a few hundred meters of one another for centuries. The Jewish Quarter, rebuilt after 1967 following its loss in 1948, holds the Western Wall, the retaining wall of Herod's Temple platform and Judaism's holiest accessible prayer site. The Armenian Quarter, the smallest, has hosted a continuous Armenian Christian presence since at least the fourth century, older than the Armenian Apostolic Church's own formal separation from Byzantine Christianity.
The Christian Quarter centers on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, jointly and often contentiously administered under a nineteenth century Ottoman arrangement, the Status Quo, by Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Armenian Apostolic and other communities down to the precise placement of a single ladder left untouched on a window ledge for generations. The Muslim Quarter, the largest, surrounds the Haram al-Sharif, the Temple Mount platform holding the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam's third holiest site after Mecca and Medina. Beyond the walls, the Mount of Olives holds an ancient Jewish cemetery, the Garden of Gethsemane and Christian churches marking Jesus's final days, while modern Jerusalem has grown into a religiously mixed city of Jewish, Muslim, Christian and small Baha'i and Druze communities whose daily coexistence and periodic conflict both continue in the same streets.