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Distributing lettuce at the 2006 Annual Artas Lettuce Festival
Artas woman baking
markook bread on Saj Oven
Artas (Arabic: أرطاس) is a Palestinian village located four kilometers southwest of Bethlehem in the Bethlehem Governorate in the central West Bank. According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, the town had a population of 3,663 in mid-year 2006.[2]
[edit] Overview of the Village
The village and the surrounding area is characterized by the diversity of landscapes, flora and fauna due to its location at a meeting place of ecosystems.[3] In it are found archeological sites and historic remains dating from the Iron Age to Ottoman times. Just across the valley from the village itself is the Convent of the Hortus Conclusus.[4] Until the nineteenth century, the Artas villagers were responsible for guarding the Solomon's Pools, a unique water system conducting water to Bethlehem and Herodium, and the Noble Sanctuary or Haram il Sharif in Jerusalem. The village has a tradition of hosting foreign and local scholars and other visitors dating to the mid-nineteenth century, not a few of whom were women.[5] As a result, there is a rich body of work on all aspects of the village.[6] The Artas Folklore Center was established in 1993 by Musa Sanad (1949-2005)[7] to document, preserve and share the rich heritage of the village. Among other things, it operates a small folklore museum, has a debka and drama troupe, and a rural women's unit. It is best known for the Annual Artas Lettuce Festival which it has hosted every year since 1994. These and other factors make Artas a popular destination for visitors to Bethlehem who want to experience traditional Palestinian life, and for groups catering to ecotourism, cultural tourism or authentic tourism.[8] Since the expropriation and destruction of orchards and groves of Artas villagers in 2007, for use by a neighboring Israeli settlement, and the construction of the Wall, the village has recently also shown up in the news in connection with the conflict.[9]
[edit] Some Foreign Residents in Artas
The earliest foreign residents in Artas came through the auspices of Christian missionaries in the mid nineteenth century, one of whom was James Finn, the British Consul of Jerusalem for seventeen years (1846 to 1863),[10] and his wife Elisabeth Ann Finn bought land in Artas, among other places, with the purpose of creating an experimental farm to employ poverty stricken Jews from the Old city of Jerusalem. Eventually the farm was joined by Johann Grosssteinbeck and his brother Friedrich and John Meshullam (1799-1878), a converted Jew and member of a British missionary society. Clorinda S. Minor was also a resident at the village in 1851 and 1853.
The Artas experiment was short-lived, but foreign missionaries as well as local and foreign scholars continued to come to Artas. One of the best known of the latter was the Swedish-Finnish anthropologist Hilma Granqvist who arrived at Artas in the 1920's as part of her research on the women of the Old Testament. She "arrived in Palestine in order to find the Jewish ancestors of Scripture. What she found instead was a Palestinian people with a distinct culture and way of life. She therefore changed the focus of her research to a full investigation of the customs, habits and ways of thinking of the people of that village. Granqvist ended up staying till 1931 documenting all aspects of village life. In so doing she took hundreds of photographs."[11] Her many books about Artas were published between 1931 and 1965, making Artas one of the best documented Palestinian villages.
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