Saint Catherine's Monastery — monastery
Berthold Werner · CC BY-SA 3.0

Saint Catherine's Monastery

  • Elevation1,570 m
  • 2 min read
  • 28.556° N 33.976° E
  • UNESCO World Heritage

Interesting facts

  • Until the twentieth century the only way into the monastery was through a door set high in its massive outer walls.
  • The oldest record of monastic life at Sinai comes from Egeria, a pilgrim from the far west of the Roman world who described it around 381 to 386.
  • Because parchment was precious, monks scraped off or washed away old texts and wrote over them; imaging has since recovered more than 6,800 hidden pages.
  • Among the recovered palimpsest texts is the oldest known recipe attributed to the Greek physician Hippocrates.
  • The palimpsests preserve rare writing in Caucasian Albanian, a language of the ancient Caucasus that had barely survived anywhere else.
  • The Codex Sinaiticus left for Russia in 1869 in exchange for a gift of 9,000 roubles from Tsar Alexander II, and Stalin sold it to the British Museum in 1933.
  • A previously unknown fragment of the Codex Sinaiticus turned up in the monastery's own library as recently as 2009.
  • The library holds manuscripts in Greek, Syriac, Georgian, Arabic, Ge'ez, Armenian, Latin and Church Slavonic, among other languages.
  • The monastery keeps more than 120 icons in the hybrid Crusader style, by far the largest such collection, many probably painted by Latin monks in the 13th century.
  • In the 15th century a visiting Dominican friar counted more than 3,000 olive trees in the monastery gardens, whose oil fed its lamps.

Why it is worth it

Saint Catherine's Monastery sits at the foot of Mount Sinai in the mountains of the southern Sinai, and it has been inhabited by monks without interruption since the sixth century, longer than any other Christian monastery. The Byzantine emperor Justinian had it built between 548 and 565, enclosing the Chapel of the Burning Bush, which tradition traces to Empress Helena and to the place where Moses saw the bush that burned without being consumed. A centuries-old bramble in the courtyard is venerated as that very bush, and the Well of Moses, where he is said to have met Zipporah, still supplies the monks with water.

Behind massive walls the monastery holds treasures that make it unique. Its library, founded in Justinian's time, is recognised as the oldest continuously operating library in the world, and its collection of early manuscripts is second only to the Vatican's. It was here that Constantin von Tischendorf found the Codex Sinaiticus, a fourth-century Bible, in the nineteenth century; the Syriac Sinaiticus remains in the monastery, and palimpsests studied in recent decades have yielded lost Greek poems and texts in almost forgotten languages. The icon collection, many painted in encaustic wax, is counted among the finest early icons anywhere and includes the oldest known image of Christ Pantocrator. The church roof preserves the oldest known surviving king-post truss.

The monastery belongs to the autonomous Church of Sinai within Greek Orthodoxy and keeps the relics of Catherine of Alexandria, whose name it took. It is sacred to Jews, Christians and Muslims alike, and a small Fatimid mosque of 1106 stands within its walls. The monks keep a charnel house where the bones of their predecessors are stacked, watched over by the robed skeleton of the monk Stephanos. The mountains around, Mount Sinai (Jebel Musa) about two kilometres to the south and Willow Peak just to the west, frame the site; the monastery was inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 2002.

Getting there

The monastery lies in the mountains of South Sinai, about 49 km in a straight line from El-Tor on the Gulf of Suez. The usual gateway is Sharm El Sheikh International Airport (SSH), about 76 km away as the crow flies, with a longer drive by road into the mountains.

Plan your visit

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Nearby places

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Egypt 35The Most Beautiful UNESCO-Listed Sacred Places in Egypt 5The Most Beautiful UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Egypt 8The Most Beautiful Sacred Places in Egypt 18The Most Beautiful UNESCO-Listed Monasteries 33The Most Beautiful Monasteries 79The Most Beautiful UNESCO-Listed Sacred Places 179The Most Beautiful UNESCO World Heritage Sites 557The Most Beautiful Sacred Places 623

From the encyclopaedia

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.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

28.55583, 33.97556per Wikidata