Jerash: The First Fake Jerusalem. Part 1

In 2019, the Russian Chronicle was first published, a valuable historical source shedding new light on many events in Russian and world history. In particular, it contains a detailed description of pilgrimages to Jerusalem in the 16th century.
Careful reading of this description leads to an unexpected conclusion: the modern city of Jerusalem that we know today is not the same Jerusalem that pilgrims visited in the 16th century. The Jerusalem of the pilgrims was located approximately a hundred kilometers to the northeast of the current city of Jerusalem. Today, it is situated in Jordan and is called Jerash. When Europeans in the 19th century were searching for Jerusalem, they made a mistake, did not reach the place they were looking for, and stopped halfway.
The second astonishing fact revealed during the investigation of Jerusalem-Jerash is that it was not a genuine Jerusalem but a FAKE JERUSALEM deliberately created to channel the flow of pilgrims there. It turns out that the idea of religious tourism didn’t first appear nowadays but as far back as the early 16th century. In the phony Jerusalem, pilgrims were shown dozens of the most famous Old Testament and New Testament sanctuaries in one or two days at the same location. The pilgrims paid money, and a lot of it.