For two thousand years, believers of all denominations - Christians and Jews - dreamt about the remote and heavenly Holy Land, without having access to the country. Only a few dared to travel and visit the land. The Bible and the New Testament inspired depictions of the Holy Land in books, paintings, carpet designs and through the stained glass windows in cathedrals. The invention of photography in the nineteenth century revolutionized the visual experience of the Holy Land, but revealed a harsh reality: the country was barren, its towns were dirty and the historical sites were in ruin. In the Holy Land, postal services were instituted in the mid-nineteenth century by the Ottoman Post. At the same time, five European powers received permission to operate their own independent postal services. The postcard was initially limited to a short text, but publishers soon understood that "a picture is worth a thousand words," and a portion of writing space was dedicated to a visual medium: a photograph, painting or illustration. Picture postcards became a popular item, especially for tourists. Printers in the nineteenth century used several methods for printing black-and-white pictures, but color printing was a new and unfamiliar technology, mastered only by a few German and Swiss printers. The superior color printing method at that time was Photochrom and the less advanced method was coarse-screen offset. By the end of the nineteenth century, black-and-white photography was a well-established professional skill. Color photography became practical only in the second decade of the twentieth century. Color printing of sites and scenes relied on black-and-white photo negatives that were subsequently hand "colored" during the plate-making process. Little wonder that publishers preferred to use paintings as the master for printing color postcards. Taking advantage of the improved travel conditions in the second half of the nineteenth century, photographers and painters visited and worked in Turkey, the Levant, Palestine, Egypt and North Africa. The dramatic increase in the number of tourists and pilgrims visiting the Holy Land in the last quarter of the nineteenth century attracted entrepreneurs in tourism, transportation, hotel services and communication. Hundreds of European publishers supplied a host of products, books, picture albums and postcards. The popular themes for black-and-white or color picture postcards were historic sites and holy places typically visited by tourists to the Holy Land. From the 1880's to the 1930's, Holy Land photographs and paintings on picture postcards excited the imagination of adherents of all denominations. Reading the Bible and the New Testament gave rise to those images of the Holy Land in vivid colors. Popular sites depicted on postcards such as Rachel's Tomb, the Tower of David, the Christian Quarter, the landing in Jaffa, the Jordan River and Tiberias became iconic images.