identified the location as Capernaum, then known in Arabic as Tell Hum. In 1894, Franciscan Friar Giuseppe Baldi of Naples, the Custodian of the Holy Land, was able to purchase a good part of the land around the ruins. Additional land on the eastern portion of the site became the property of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem.

In 1905, Germans Heinrich Kohl and Carl Watzinger