Ancient history Roman and Byzantine periods Qalunya preserves the name of
Colonia Amosa or
Colonia Emmaus, a
Roman colony established at the site of the Jewish village of
Motza, which was destroyed during the
First Jewish–Roman War. After 71 CE, Emperor
Vespasian settled 800 Roman soldiers in the town, The word
colonia produced the
Byzantine-period Greek name, Koloneia, for the site. The status of the site in the early Islamic period has not been established, but the name was preserved in
Crusader times as Qalonie or Qalunia and in Arabic as Qalunya.
Mujir al-Din al-Hanbali reported that in 1192 it was a village near Jerusalem.
New Testament It has also been suggested that Qalunya was
Emmaus of the
New Testament. The site is at more or less the correct distance from Jerusalem to match the story told in the
Gospel of Luke (). The village where Vespasian settled the 800 veterans was known as Emmaus at that time. The new military colony completely eclipsed the title town and its name was lost to history. During the Byzantine period the name Emmaus was not in use, so the Byzantine Christians did not know of it. The tradition of Emmaus was attached to
Emmaus-Nicopolis instead. Excavations in 2001-2003 headed by Professor
Carsten Peter Thiede let him conclude that Khirbet Mizza/Tel Moza was the only credible candidate for biblical Emmaus.
Ottoman period In the 1596
tax registers, Qalunya was a village in the
Ottoman Empire,
nahiya (subdistrict) of
Jerusalem under the ''
liwa''' (district) of
Jerusalem, and it had a population of 19 Muslim households, an estimated 110 persons. The villagers paid a fixed tax rate of 33,3% on a number of crops, including
wheat,
barley and
olives, as well as on
goats,
beehives and
molasses; a total of 6,450
akçe. All of the revenue went to
Waqf. In 1838,
Kulonieh was noted as a Muslim village in the
Beni Malik district, west of Jerusalem. In 1863
Victor Guérin found it to be a village of 500 inhabitants, while an Ottoman village list from about 1870 found that
Kalonije had a population of 120, in 43 houses, though the population count included men, only. In 1883, the
PEF's
Survey of Western Palestine (SWP) described Qalunya as being a moderate-sized village perched on the slope of a hill, above a valley. Travelers reported that it had a "modern" restaurant. The villagers tended
orange and
lemon trees that were planted around a spring in the valley. To the west of the restaurant were ruins, possible of Byzantine origin. In the 1890s, Jews purchased some of Qalunya's farmlands, and established the village of
Motza, the first Jewish settlement outside Jerusalem. In 1896 the population of
Kalonije was estimated to be about 312 persons.
British Mandate In the
1922 census of Palestine, conducted by the
British Mandate authorities, Qalunieh (Qalonia) had a population 549; 456 Muslims, 88 Jews and 5 Orthodox Christians, increasing in the
1931 census to 632, 632 Muslims and 10 Christians; in a total of 156 houses. During the
1929 Palestine riots, several residents of Qalunya attacked an outlying house in
Motza belonging to the Maklef family, killing the father, mother, son, two daughters, and their two guests. Three children survived by escaping out a second-story window; one,
Mordechai Maklef, later became
Chief of Staff of the Israeli Army. The attackers included the lone police officer and armed man in the area, as well as a shepherd employed by the Maklef family. The village was subsequently abandoned by Jews for a year's time. In the
1945 statistics, Qalunya had a population of 900 Muslims and 10 Christians, while
Motza had a population of 350 Jews. while 227 dunams were classified as built-up areas.
1948, and after Qalunya was situated just east of the battlefield of
Castel and part of the
Arab siege on Jerusalem. As a result on 11 April 1948, as part of
Operation Nachshon,
Hagana forces entered the village and blew up 50 houses - after "the inhabitants had been evacuated." According to
Ilan Pappe, Qalunya was one of four villages that were systematically destroyed by Hagana units in this fashion in the immediate wake of the
Deir Yassin massacre; the others being,
Beit Surik,
Biddu and
Saris. The remains of a Byzantine Church were discovered on the site. In 2012 Israeli archaeologists discovered the
Tel Motza temple, an
Israelite cultic building dating to the monarchic period (
Iron Age IIA). ==References==