Boticella and Beit Jala: The Name One Act Finally Translated

On a 3 June whose year is not written, between the 1675 entries and the date 1676 carried two folios further on, a priest of St Saviour’s in Jerusalem brings six villagers back from the Greek rite to the Catholic faith, at the convent of St John-in-the-Mountain. All of them come from "della Villa di Boticella." The priest does not explain where the village is. He writes it as he would write Bethlehem.

Over the following two years, the same register names other villagers of Boticella reconciled to the Church, one by one, each with his father’s name beside him. None of them needs to be told where his own village is.

The same name, one war later

Sixty-four years later, in November 1740, the baptismal register of Bethlehem opens on a run of delayed baptisms. Parents have fled a war, and that is why their child is baptised late.

Five other entries on the same folio, from October to December 1740, carry the same note, in three different spellings on the same page: Beit Giala, Beitgiala, Beitgala. The corpus does not harmonise them.

Two years later, another name for another war

In February 1742, at Bethlehem, a fourteen-year-old boy dies "at Boticella, in time of war." Greeks bury him on the spot, without the Catholic priest’s knowledge. In the months that follow, other children and young people of the parish die in the same place, buried as he was.

The corpus never connects these two wars. Boticella and Beit Giala each live their own life in the register, in two different hands, two years apart, and no priest ever writes that they are the same place.

A priest hesitates over the spelling

Twenty years later, in Jerusalem this time, a third priest baptises a child born "in the town" of the same name. For the first time in the corpus, he hesitates over how to write it at all.

The word still resists today: Boticellae or Beticellae, two candidates on the table, neither retained.

A war told in detail

In February 1767, a man of Bethlehem dies "near Boticella," killed in a fight against Turks commonly called the Cassavieri. Five days later, a second man falls, and this time the priest tells the whole affair: the expulsion of the same Turks eight years earlier, their return, the declaration of war.

This time, no hesitation in the writing: the priest names Boticella three times on the same page. Three years later, a new war breaks out, and the name becomes a gentilic.

1797: an act translates itself

It takes twenty-seven more years, and a step outside any war narrative, for an ordinary act to finally say what Boticella means. On 3 November 1797, at Bethlehem, a priest baptises the daughter of a priest and a village woman.

"Vulgo": commonly, as people say. The 1797 priest is not solving a mystery. He is reminding his readers of something obvious. It is the only time, in a hundred and twenty years of registers, that anyone bothers to write it down.

One clarification belongs here, because it touches on how we work. Our own cataloguing has already brought the two names together: four entries from 1742 carry "in Boticella" in the field that preserves the source’s words, and "Beit Jala" in the neighbouring field, where we normalise places for searching. That is a modern working hypothesis, ours, not an archival reading, and it is not proof. The 1797 act is of another order: it is the only place in the corpus where a man of the time writes the equivalence himself.

This sentence proves nothing for 1676, nor for 1740, nor for 1742, nor for 1767. It proves only that in 1797, at Bethlehem, one priest read Boticella and Beit Jala as a single place. The wars told above stay, in the corpus, under the name Boticella alone: no act ties them to Beit Giala, which other priests, in those same years, were already using for a place in its own right.

The same stretch of hills, perhaps, carried by two mouths and two alphabets for over a century, until a baptism, without dwelling on it, finally lets them meet. This connection has just entered the family-reconstruction work the programme carries out. For everything before 1797, the question stays open.