Saint Catherine's Monastery

UNESCO World Heritage Site

Saint Catherine Area
Name as inscribed on the World Heritage List
Country	Egypt
Type	Cultural
Criteria	i, iii, iv, vi
Reference	954
UNESCO region	Arab States
Inscription history
Inscription	2002 (26th Session)

Saint Catherine's Monastery (Greek: Μονὴ τῆς Ἁγίας Αἰκατερίνης Monì tìs Agìas Ekaterìnis), in Arabic دير القدّيسة كاترينا commonly known as Santa Katarina lies on the Sinai Peninsula, at the mouth of a gorge at the foot of Mount Sinai in the city of Saint Catherine in Egypt's South Sinai Governorate. The monastery is Orthodox and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Built between 548 and 565, UNESCO report 60100 ha / Ref: 954 states this monastery is one of the oldest working Christian monasteries in the world together with the Monastery of Saint Anthony, situated across the Red Sea in the desert south of Cairo, which also lays claim to that title. In the area around the monastery, a small town has grown, with hotels and swimming pools, called Saint Katherine City.

Christian traditions

According to tradition, Catherine of Alexandria was a Christian martyr initially sentenced to death on the wheel. However, when this failed to kill her, she was beheaded. According to tradition, angels took her remains to Mount Sinai. Around the year 800, monks from the Sinai Monastery found her remains. Though it is commonly known as Saint Catherine's, the full, official name of the monastery is the Sacred and Imperial Monastery of the God-Trodden Mount of Sinai, and the patronal feast of the monastery is the Transfiguration. The relics of Saint Catherine of Alexandria were purported to have been miraculously transported there by angels and it became a favorite site of pilgrimage.

History

6th-century hot wax icon

The oldest record of monastic life at Sinai comes from the travel journal written in Latin by a woman named Egeria about 381-384. She visited many places around the Holy Land and Mount Sinai, where, according to the Hebrew Bible, Moses received the Ten Commandments from God.

The monastery was built by order of Emperor Justinian I (reigned 527-565), enclosing the Chapel of the Burning Bush ordered to be built by Helena, the mother of Constantine I, at the site where Moses is supposed to have seen the burning bush; the living bush on the grounds is purportedly the original. Structurally the monastery has the oldest known surviving roof truss in the world, a king post truss. It is also referred to as "St. Helen's Chapel." The site is sacred to Christianity and Islam.

Saint Catherine's monastery, 1852

Patent of Mohammed

A Fatimid mosque was built within the walls of the monastery, but it has never been used since it is not correctly oriented towards Mecca.

During the seventh century, the isolated Christian anchorites of the Sinai were eliminated: only the fortified monastery remained. The monastery is still surrounded by the massive fortifications that have preserved it. Until the twentieth century, access was through a door high in the outer walls. From the time of the First Crusade, the presence of Crusaders in the Sinai until 1270 spurred the interest of European Christians and increased the number of intrepid pilgrims who visited the monastery. The monastery was supported by its dependencies in Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Crete, Cyprus and Constantinople.

The monastery, along with several dependencies in the area, constitute the entire Orthodox Church of Mount Sinai, which is headed by an archbishop, who is also the abbot of the monastery. The exact administrative status of the church within Eastern Orthodoxy is ambiguous: by some, including the church itself, it is considered autocephalous, by others an autonomous church under the jurisdiction of the Greek Orthodox Church of Jerusalem. The archbishop is traditionally consecrated by the Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem; in recent centuries he has usually resided in Cairo. During the period of the Crusades, 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 elites.

Manuscripts and icons

The monastery library preserves the second largest collection of early codices and manuscripts in the world, outnumbered only by the Vatican Library. It contains Greek, Arabic, Armenian, Coptic, Hebrew, Georgian, and Aramaic texts.

In May 1844, Konstantin 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. It left the monastery in the 19th century for Russia, in circumstances that are now disputed. It was later bought by the British Government from Russia and is now in the British Library. Prior to September 1, 2009, a previously unseen fragment of Codex Sinaiticus was discovered in the monastery's library.

In February 1892, Agnes Smith Lewis identified a palimpsest in St Catherine's library that became known as the Syriac Sinaiticus and is still in the Monastery's possession. Agnes and her sister Margaret Dunlop Gibson returned with a team of scholars that included J. Rendel Harris, to photograph and transcribe the work in its entirety. As the manuscript predates the Codex Sinaiticus, it became crucial in understanding the history of the New Testament.

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

The most important manuscripts have since been filmed or digitized, and so are accessible to scholars. This is certainly not the case for the discoveries of 1975, which previously could be viewed and evaluated exclusively by Kurt Aland and Barbara Aland from the Institute for New Testament Textual Research in Münster, Germany in 1982. A team of imaging scientists and scholars from the USA and Europe is currently using spectral imaging techniques developed for imaging the Archimedes Palimpsest to study more than one hundred palimpsests in the monastery library.

Works of art

The complex houses irreplaceable works of art: mosaics, the best collection of early icons in the world, many in encaustic, as well as liturgical objects, chalices and reliquaries, and church buildings. The large icon collection begins with a few dating to the 5th (possibly) and 6th centuries, which are unique survivals, the monastery having been untouched by Byzantine iconoclasm, and never sacked. The oldest icon on an Old Testament theme is also preserved there. A project to catalogue the collections has been ongoing since the 1960s. The monastery was an important centre for the development of the hybrid style of Crusader art, and still retains over 120 icons created in the style, by far the largest collection in existence. Many were evidently created by Latins, probably monks, based in or around the monastery in the 13th century.

Icons

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  Icon of the enthroned Virgin and Child with saints and angels, 6th century

• 

  The oldest known icon of Christ Pantocrator, encaustic on panel

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  Crucifixion, 13th century

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  Holy doors

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  Madonna and Child, 13th century

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  13th century Byzantine icon of St. Michael, the Archangel

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  Transfiguration, 12th century

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  Ladder of Divine Ascent

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  Emperor John VIII Palaiologos

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  Icon of Saint Catherine of Alexandria

A panorama of St Catherine's

See also

• Archbishop of Mount Sinai and Raithu
• Charnel House
• Eastern Christianity
• Gregory of Sinai
• Ladder of Divine Ascent
• Oldest churches in the world
• Poustinia
• Syriac Sinaiticus
• Kurt Weitzmann
• Catherine of Alexandria
• Agnes and Margaret Smith

Further reading

• Forsyth, G. H.; Weitzmann, K. (1973). The Monastery of Saint Catherine at Mount Sinai - The Church and Fortress of Justinian: Plates. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-472-33000-4. 
• Soskice, Janet (1991). Sisters of Sinai: How Two Lady Adventurers Found the Hidden Gospels. London: Vintage. ISBN 978-1-4000-3474-1. 
• Sotiriou, G. and M. (1956-8). Icones du Mont Sinaï. 2 vols (plates and texts). Collection de L'Institut francais d'Athènes 100 and 102. Athens. 
• Weitzmann, K. (1976). The Monastery of Saint Catherine at Mihnt Sinai: The Icons, Volume I: From the Sixth to the Tenth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 
• Weitzmann, K.; Galavaris, G. (1991). The Monastery of Saint Catherine at Mount Sinai. The Illuminated Greek Manuscripts, Volume I. From the Ninth to the Twelfth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-03602-0. 

External links

• Saint Catherine Area World Heritage Listing on UNESCO's Website
• Official Website of the Holy Monastery of St. Catherine at Mount Sinai
• Chapel of St. Helen
• St. Catherine's Monastery, Sinai, Egypt
• Camberwell/St.Catherine's Project
• St Catherine Project (digitisation) video
• Holy Image, Hallowed Ground: Icons from Sinai Getty exhibit
• Early Icons from Sinai, Belmont U
• St. Catherine's Monastery (Sinai) (OrthodoxWiki article)
• The text of the Charter from Muhammad can be read here or here.
• At a Mountain Monastery, Old Texts Gain Digital Life article from New York Times
• Information about the town of St. Catherine
•  "Monastery of St. Catherine". Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. 1913. 
• 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.
• The Albanian Script: The Process - How Its Secrets Were Revealed [St. Catherine's], Azerbaijan International, Vol. 11:3 (Autumn 2003), pp. 44-51.