Karak

This is Karak.  Anciently it was the capitol of Moab and was called Kir in the Old Testament.  The first reference to Kir is in Numbers 22 when King Balak of Kir calls for Balaam, a Midianite prophet (the one whose donkey talked to him) to come curse Israel.  The site of this city is near the southern end of the Dead Sea.  Balaam stood here, and saw Israelites camped in the valleys.  He went about 30 miles north to Madaba and saw more Israelites and then another 30 miles north about to Amman, where he exclaimed "What hath God wrought?"  What you see in the following photos is the crusader installment built starting in about 1140 a.d.   The castle complex covers an area of 9 million square feet with another 23 million square feet of underground halls, rooms, chapels, storage rooms and granaries.

 The castle is surrounded on three sides by what the French call a "Glace`" (pronounced Gla-say).  That is the smooth brick covering the hill going up to the castle.  It made it impossible for man or beast to scale when attacking the castle.  The only side the castle could be attacked from was the town side.  A huge dry moat separates the the castle from the town, but even so the crusaders were only able to hold on to the castle for about 46 years when the castle was overthrown by the Muslims under Saledin in about 1200 a.d.  Examples of both crusader and Muslim architecture are evident throughout the castle.

I am actually standing on the roof of the longest hall...undoubtably the judgement hall of the local ruler.  On the right side of the photo you can see the castle ramparts.  The arches were where the archers stood to shoot arrows

This is the LONG hall.  I am not a very good judge of distance, but a modest estimate would be at least 2 hundred feet long and about 30 feet wide.  The room is lit by a system of skylights.  It stays quite cool in the summer and is probably ridiculously cold in the winter.

Jeremy is showing us how the archers might have stood to protect the castle from attack.  Frankly it seems a redundant system as any attacker would have had to scale literally hundreds, perhaps nearly a thousand feet in order to attack this north side of the castle.  

Here is Jared looking over the Glace` on the South side of the castle.  It is a LONG way down to the road below!  

Here is a small example leading into the maze of rooms below the ground level of the castle.  It was absolutely mind boggling how much room they utilized below the ground.  You can also see one of the few remaining remnants of a building  that was above the ground.  My guess is that much of the above ground level of the castle may have been used for gardens.