translated by Kleitia Zeqo and Wayne Miller
The Empty Tomb of Christ
In the early morning of June 7, 1089, from a high mountain that would later be called Mount Joy, the European crusaders first saw Jerusalem—triply sacred to Christians, Jews, and Muslims—called in ancient Hebrew “Yerushalayim,” “Al-Quds” in Arabic, occupied by the kings of Judea, by Alexander the Great, by the Seleucid kings, Imperial Rome, Byzantium, the Arabs, and the Seljuks, renowned for its unique, hallucinatory beauty as well as for the Temple of the Resurrection and the Tomb of God at its center, and also guarded by an Arab garrison of 1,000 troops, so when the crusaders’ first attack failed, European ships began to arrive in the Port of Jaffa with reinforcements, and the Arab defenders shot the attackers with “Greek fire,” and the crusaders’ camp was often without drinking water, and there were many priests with wooden crosses in their hands, among them Bishop Adhemar, the nuncio of Pope Urban II, until July 15, 1099, when the final attack was made and Jerusalem was conquered, and 70,000 people (including the Muslim fighters) had been killed, and thousands of innocents sought refuge in the Al Aqsa Mosque that stood on the site of Solomon’s Temple, but the victors didn’t spare the elders or children, the houses were looted of their valuables (gold, silver, and other plunder), even the Christian temples were looted, and the crusaders declared Godfrey of Bouillon king, but he refused to be crowned “where Christ was crowned with a crown of thorns” and agreed only to accept the title Protector of the Tomb of God, and he erected a monastery in the Valley of Josophat, and then on July 18, 1100, Godfrey of Bouillon died in Jerusalem and was ceremonially buried in the Temple of the Resurrection near the Tomb of God, and so the crusaders established the Kingdom of Jerusalem, proclaiming Baldwin—Godfrey’s brother—king on December 25, 1100, and on the feast of the Resurrection Baldwin I was crowned in Bethlehem, where Jesus Christ was born, and this event was the greatest event of the 12th century!—the century of the hero Florimont,[1] and the author of the Florimont manuscript might have been in Jerusalem among the French crusaders, those Europeans who came to see the Tomb of God, God who could never have a tomb since God cannot die (what atheism lives in the phrase “Tomb of God”), an empty tomb and an empty womb are the same, but Mary’s womb could never have been the tomb of baby Jesus, because beyond his role in the Trinity, Christ has another essential quality, his own divided nature—both divine and human—and he must have wanted to abandon his human nature in Jerusalem, but why choose to die foolishly mocked if these two natures were in the same body, what did his divine nature do when the human nature was dying, how could the human nature die when it was united (conjoined?) with the divine (how can a purple horse run away from its color?)—but the crusaders didn’t think at all, it wasn’t their job to think, they won and found an empty tomb, this is what people misunderstand about history, people fight and sacrifice for empty tombs, and Christ in heaven must have been horrified and mourned the violent scene, the crusaders were seeking his tomb but he could never have a tomb, the death of his immortal self had become mythologized and misunderstood, which was an insult to him, they celebrated his resurrection, but in the empty aftermath he never again appeared within human nature, although his second coming was prophesized, and all of the twelfth century couldn’t even begin to understand this dilemma of the human-divine, the twelfth century that belonged more to Florimont, who was the crusaders’ chronological contemporary but not their spiritual contemporary, pre-Alexandrian Florimont who was also a precursor to the crusaders, and so the twelfth century is the very core of the middle ages, concentrated like matter inside a dwarf star—just a pinch weighs more than a cathedral—and the inhabitants of Durrës rejoiced when they learned that Jerusalem had been conquered, they sang magnificent litanies in their churches, celebrated on the seashore, though they were lucky that Christ hadn’t died somewhere in the hills of Durrës because then the catastrophe of the Crusades would not have spared them—their being spared means that Durrës, not Jerusalem, was blessed by Christ.
Durrës, 2003
from the Albanian
[1] The Florimont manuscript is a 12th century illuminated manuscript written by Aimon de Varennes, a Lyonese poet. A prequel to the Roman d’Alexander, the manuscript tells the story of Florimont, the fictional Albanian grandfather of Alexander the Great.
Wayne Miller is the author of six poetry collections—most recently The End of Childhood (Milkweed, 2025) and We the Jury (2021). He has co-translated two of Zeqo’s poetry collections, most recently Zodiac (Zephyr, 2015), which was shortlisted for the PEN Center USA Award in Translation. He co-directs the Unsung Masters Series, teaches at the University of Colorado Denver, and edits Copper Nickel. Kleitia Zeqo, Moikom Zeqo’s daughter, lives in Amsterdam and works as a consultant for the European Commission. She holds degrees from Royal Holloway and the London School of Economics. Moikom Zeqo was considered one of Albania’s most important writers and public intellectuals. After his work was suppressed in 1973, Zeqo reinvented himself as an underwater archeologist. In 1991, he was appointed Albania’s Minister of Culture, and from 1992–6 he served in Albania’s Parliament. From 1998–2004, he directed the National Historical Museum. By the time of his death in 2020, he had published 100 books.