Mary's Well

Mary's Well (Ain Maryam, ʿAin il- ʿadhrāʾ, "The spring of the Virgin Mary")) is a freshwater spring reputed to be located at the site where, according to one Christian tradition associated with the apocryphal Gospel of James, Archangel Gabriel appeared to Mary, mother of Jesus and announced that she would bear the Son of God – an event known as the Annunciation. It has been further associated in the past with episodes from another apocryphal infancy gospel, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. Two adjacent sites historically fed by the same spring are popularly known as Mary's Well – the spring underneath the Greek Orthodox Church of the Annunciation (also known as St. Gabriel's), and the well structure in the plaza to its south - which served as the sole water source of the village until the nineteenth century, and continued to be used by those without plumbing or home cisterns well into the twentieth century. Originally on the outskirts of Nazareth and seen as a sanctified source by both the Christian and Muslim inhabitants and Christian pilgrims from around the world for nearly two millennia, as the city expanded, it became a central square and meeting place for the Palestinian community and is a symbol of the city.

Monument data from Wikidata (CC0). Summary from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).