Saint Catherine's Monastery

Saint Catherine's Monastery ( , ), officially the Sacred Autonomous Royal Monastery of Saint Catherine of the Holy and God-Trodden Mount Sinai, is a Christian monastery located in the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt. Located at the foot of Mount Sinai, it was built between 548 and 565, and is the world's oldest continuously inhabited Christian monastery.

The monastery was built by order of the Byzantine emperor Justinian I, enclosing what is claimed to be the burning bush seen by Moses. The monastery includes a Fatimid mosque built in 1106 AD that is still preserved.

The monastery library holds unique and rare works, such as the Codex Sinaiticus and the Syriac Sinaiticus,

Christian traditions

The monastery was built around the site traditionally considered to be the place of the burning bush seen by the Hebrew prophet Moses. Saint Catherine's monastery also encloses the "Well of Moses", where Moses is said to have met his future wife, Zipporah. The well is still today one of the monastery's main sources of water. The site is considered sacred by adherents of the three major Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Centuries after its foundation, the body of Saint Catherine of Alexandria was said to be found in a cave in the area. The relics of Saint Catherine, kept to this day inside the monastery, have made it a favourite site of pilgrimage.

The monastery was built by order of the Byzantine emperor Justinian I (reigned 527–565), enclosing the Chapel of the Burning Bush (also known as "Saint Helen's Chapel") ordered to be built by Empress Consort Helena, mother of Constantine I, at the site where Moses is supposed to have seen the burning bush. The bush on the grounds is said to be the one seen by Moses. Structurally, the monastery's king post truss is the oldest known surviving roof truss in the world.

From the time of the First Crusade, the presence of Crusaders in the Sinai until 1270 spurred the interest of European Christians. It increased the number of intrepid pilgrims who visited the monastery. Its dependencies in Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Crete, Cyprus and Constantinople supported the monastery. Throughout the Middle Ages, the monastery had a multiethnic profile, with monks of Arab, Greek, Syrian, Slavonic and Georgian origin. However, in the Ottoman period, the monastic community became almost exclusively Greek Orthodox, possibly due to the decline and depopulation of Transjordanian Christian towns. From the 1480s onwards, Wallachian princes began sending alms to the monastery.

A mosque was created by converting an existing chapel during the Fatimid Caliphate (909–1171), which was in regular use until the era of the Mamluk Sultanate in the 13th century and is still in use today on special occasions. During the Ottoman Empire, the mosque was in desolate condition; it was restored in the early 20th century.

thumb|[[Minaret of the mosque, built in 1106 The exact administrative status of the church within the Eastern Orthodox Church is ambiguous: by some, including the church itself, it is considered autocephalous, by others an autonomous church under the jurisdiction of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem. The archbishop is traditionally consecrated by the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem; in recent centuries, he has usually resided in Cairo. During the period of the Crusades, which was marked by bitterness between the Orthodox and Catholic churches, the monastery was patronized by both the Byzantine emperors and the rulers of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and their respective courts.

Dominican theologian Felix Fabri visited the monastery in the 15th century and provided a detailed account. He also described the monastery's gardens, noting the presence of "tall fruit trees, salad herbs, grass, and grain," and "more than three thousand olive trees, many fig-trees and pomegranates, and a store of almonds and other fruits." The olives were used to produce oil for lighting lamps and as a relish in the kitchen.

The monastery prospered for most of the Mamluk Sultanate, but as the Sultanate declined, it went through a crisis. While there had been several hundred monks in the mid-14th century, a hundred years later, there were only several dozen. Bedouins began harassing the community, robbing their property in the Christian coastal village of el-Tor. In 1505, the monastery was captured and sacked. Although the Mamluk Sultanate demanded that the property be returned to the monks, they were unable to subdue the Bedouins and maintain order. The German explorer Martin von Baumgarten visited the monastery in 1507 and noticed its decline.

On May 28, 2025, the Ismailia Court of Appeal, an appellate Egyptian court, issued a 160 page opinion between the South Sinai Governorate and Church of Sinai over the underlying lands of the monastery and its immediate surroundings. The opinion stated the monastery has usufruct rights and is public domain and classified as an antiquity, under the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. The opinion specifically focused on cadastre while omitting the Ashtiname of Muhammad and UNESCO. This case is still technically ongoing as of early 2026 as the South Sinai Governorate filed a request for omission, specifically about the court's failure to settle the question over any outstanding financial obligations and the extant of authority for any property changes to the Governorate.

The ruling has created concerns between Cairo and the EU, specifically Athens and the Greek Orthodox Church, over Egypt's state-sponsored Great Transfiguration project, a massive commercial revamp aimed at religious tourism. Kyriakos Mitsotakis, and Patriarch Theophilos III have been reassured that Cairo is serious about affirming the unique sovereignty of the monastery. Abdel Fattah El-Sisi co-chaired the first meeting of Higher Council for Cooperation in Athens with Kyriakos Mitsotakis at the Maximos Mansion met days earlier on May 7, over a myriad of topics. In a statement published on June 4 by the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Greek Minister George Gerapetritis and Egyptian Minister Badr Abdelatty conversed several times in Athens and Cairo over the novel ruling and were assured that Egypt will preserve the monastery's religious autonomy.

On October 30, Michael Rigas observed the enthronement of Symeon VI, born in Greece, as Archbishop of Mount Sinai and Raithu at the monastery, after Archimandrite Symeon previously was elected, and ordained at Church of the Holy Sepulchre. and then traveling to Greece in November. However, Egypt has asserts any legal agreement to be the legally binding and to represent legal monastery disputes, an abbot must be an Egyptian citizen. However as per the Egyptian Nationality Law, granting citizenship requires 10 years of domestic residency unless a presidential decree is received.

Manuscripts and icons

thumb|280px|Georgian manuscript from St. Catherine's Monastery, Sinai Mountain, 979 AD.

The monastery's library, founded sometime between 527 and 565, is recognized by Guinness World Records as the world's oldest continuously operating library. It preserves the world's second-largest collection of early codices and manuscripts, outnumbered only by the Vatican Library. It contains Greek, Christian Palestinian Aramaic, Syriac, Georgian, Arabic, Geʽez, Latin, Armenian, and Church Slavonic manuscripts and books, along with very rare Hebrew and Coptic books.

thumb|left|upright=0.9|[[Ashtiname of Muhammad, granting protection and other privileges to the followers of Jesus]]

In May 1844 and February 1859, Constantin von Tischendorf visited the monastery for research and discovered the Codex Sinaiticus, dating from the 4th century, at the time the oldest almost completely preserved manuscript of the Bible. The finding from 1859 left the monastery for Imperial Russia in circumstances that had been long disputed. But in 2003 Russian scholars discovered the donation act for the manuscript signed by the Council of Cairo Metochion and Archbishop Callistratus on 13 November 1869. The monastery received 9000 rubles as a gift from Tsar Alexander II of Russia. The Codex was sold by Stalin in 1933 to the British Museum and is now in the British Library, London, where it is on public display. Prior to September 1, 2009, a previously unseen fragment of Codex Sinaiticus was discovered in the monastery's library, as well as among the New Finds of 1975.

Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson

In February 1892, Agnes S. Lewis discovered an early palimpsest manuscript of the Gospel in St Catherine Monastery's library that became known as the Syriac Sinaiticus and it remains in the monastery's possession. The text was deciphered by Francis Crawford Burkitt and Robert Lubbock Bensly. The twins Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson returned in 1893 with the Cambridge team of the two scholars that included their wives, and also J. Rendel Harris to photograph and transcribe the manuscript in its entirety, as well as to prepare the first catalogues of the Syriac and Arabic manuscripts. Among the new finds two additional palimpsest manuscripts came to light containing additional passages of the Old Syriac Gospels.

The Monastery also has a copy of the Ashtiname of Muhammad, in which Muhammad is claimed to have bestowed his protection upon the monastery.

Additionally, the monastery houses a copy of Mok'c'evay K'art'lisay, a collection of supplementary books of The Georgian Chronicles dating to the 9th century.

The most important manuscripts have since been filmed or digitized and are therefore accessible to scholars. With planning assistance from Ligatus, a research center of the University of the Arts London, the library was extensively renovated, reopening at the end of 2017.

Palimpsests are notable for having been reused one or more times over the centuries. Since parchment was expensive and time-consuming to produce, monks would erase texts with orange juice or scrape them off and write over them. imaging scientists used narrowband multispectral imaging techniques and technologies to reveal features that were difficult to see with the human eye, including ink residues and small grooves in the parchment. Highlights include "108 pages of previously unknown Greek poems and the oldest-known recipe attributed to the Greek physician Hippocrates;" additional folios for the transmission of the Old Syriac Gospels; a previously unknown martyrdom of Patriklos of Caesarea Maritima (Israel), one of the eleven followers of Pamphilus of Caesarea; some of the earliest known Georgian manuscripts; as well as insight into dead languages such as the previously hardly attested Caucasian Albanian and Christian Palestinian Aramaic, the local dialect of the early Byzantine period, with many unparalleled text witnesses. The objective of the Saint Catherine Foundation is to house 2,187 parchment manuscripts in individual boxes made from stainless steel. These are determined to provide the best protection against the desert environment, natural disasters such as earthquakes, and erosion from age.

Stainless steel was recommended over wooden boxes due to the potential of acidic gasses being released inside a sealed box, damaging any pigments in the miniatures that are pH sensitive. Stainless steel boxes are resistant to insect attack while wooden boxes are not. Wood boxes tend to offer more insulation against heat penetration in case of a fire but are flammable whereas stainless steel is fireproof. Each case utilizes an oxygen starvation system allowing for greater protection against fire damage.

Icons

File:Saint Peter-Sinai (6th Century).jpg|Saint Peter depicted in 6th-century hot wax icon

File:Encaustic Virgin.jpg|Icon of the enthroned Virgin and Child with saints and angels, 6th century

File:Spas vsederzhitel sinay.jpg|The oldest known icon of Christ Pantocrator, encaustic on panel

File:Last Judgement Sinai 12th century.jpg|The Last Judgement, 11th–12th century, by John Tokhabi

File:Crucifixion Icon Sinai 13th century.jpg|Crucifixion, 13th century

File:Holy Doors.jpg|Holy doors

File:Mary & Child Icon Sinai 13th century.jpg|Madonna and child, 13th century

File:Mikharkhangel.jpg|13th century Byzantine icon of Saint Michael the Archangel

File:Transfiguration of Christ Icon Sinai 12th century.jpg|Transfiguration, 12th century

File:The Ladder of Divine Ascent Monastery of St Catherine Sinai 12th century.jpg|Ladder of Divine Ascent

File:John VIII Palaiologos, Sinai.jpg|Emperor John VIII Palaiologos

File:Icon of Saint Catherine.jpg|Icon of Saint Catherine of Alexandria

File:Icon Iakovos Moskos.jpg|The monastery, 18th century

File:Vethiy Denmi (Icons from Saint Catherine's Monastery).jpg|Christ as the Ancient of Days, 7th century

File:Icon of Saint George and the Georgian King David IV. Sinai, Monastery of Saint Catherine.jpg|12th century icon of Saint George and David IV of Georgia

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Historical images

File:El Greco 043.jpg|El Greco (1568)

File:Saint Catherine's Monastery, Carsten Niebuhr, 1762.jpg|Carsten Niebuhr (1762)

File:Monastery of Saint Catherine at Mount Sinai- drawing from the Description de l'Égypte (1809).jpeg|Description de l'Égypte (1809)

File:David Roberts - Convent of St. Catherine with Mount Horeb - 1927.90 - Cleveland Museum of Art.jpg|David Roberts (1839), published in The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt, and Nubia

File:Die Gartenlaube (1861) b 060.jpg|Ernst Keil (1861)

File:Adolf Von Meckel - The Saint Catherine Monastery in Sinai.jpg|Adolf Meckel von Hemsbach (1892)

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Panoramic view

In literature

The French novelist Pierre Loti describes the monastery and its treasures extensively in Le désert, his 1895 account of a journey on camelback through the Sinai desert.

Notes

References

External links

Official Website of the Holy Monastery of St. Catherine at Mount Sinai
Saint Catherine Area/ World Heritage Listing on UNESCO's Website
Saint Catherine Foundation
St. Catherine's Monastery, Sinai, Egypt
St Catherine Project (digitisation) video
Digitized palimpsests in St. Catherine's Monastery, Sinai
Holy Image, Hallowed Ground: Icons from Sinai Getty exhibit
Early Icons from Sinai, Belmont U
The text of the Charter from Muhammad can be read here or here.
"At a Mountain Monastery, Old Texts Gain Digital Life" article from The New York Times
Information about the town of St. Catherine
Prophet Muhammad's Letter to Monks of St. Catharine Monastery
More on Saint Catherine's Monastery and Mount Sinai
Caucasian Albanian Alphabet: Ancient Script Discovered in the Ashes [St. Catherine's], Azerbaijan International, Vol. 11:3 (Autumn 2003), pp. 38–41.
Article on the Orthodox Church of Mount Sinai by Ronald Roberson on the CNEWA web site
The Albanian Script: The Process – How Its Secrets Were Revealed [St. Catherine's], Azerbaijan International, Vol. 11:3 (Autumn 2003), pp. 44–51.
Map showing the Monastery, 18th century . Eran Laor Cartographic Collection. The National Library of Israel
Pope Gregory X's Privilege for the Holy Monastery of St Catherine of Sinai (24 September 1274): Engineering Historical Memory. Interactive scholarly edition, Diplomatics and Historical Commentary, Deep zoom, English translation, multimodal resources mashup (publications, images, videos).