Saint Catherine's Monastery

Saint Catherine's Monastery

Saint Catherine’s Monastery, a Greek Orthodox monastery located on Mount Sinai at more than 1,500 meters above sea level in a narrow valley north of Mount Musa in the Sinai Peninsula, is situated at the mouth of a canyon difficult to access at the foot of Mount Sinai.
It is built where tradition assumes that Moses saw the “bush that burned without being consumed”. It is one of the oldest monasteries still inhabited.
Often incorrectly called the Independent Greek Orthodox Church of Sinai, the monastic foundation is the smallest of the autonomous churches that together constitute the Eastern Orthodox Church.
The abbot of the monastery, who is also archbishop of Sinai, Paran and Raithu, is elected by the brotherhood and consecrated by the Greek Orthodox patriarch of Jerusalem. One of its first abbots was St. John Climacus.

History of the Monastery

The monastery was at first under the jurisdiction of the Patriarch of Jerusalem; its independence was recognized by Constantinople in 1575.
The number of monks is limited to 36; this figure includes those living in annexes (metochia) in other places, who today are mainly in Cairo and Suez Canal in Egypt. The laity of the Church of Sinai are some Arab Christians employed by the monastery and fishermen on the Red Sea coast at al-Ṭūr (Tor, formerly Raithu).

Muslim Bedouin Arabs living near the monastery have always acted as its guards and, in turn, have been supported by the monastery.
The monastery is of great importance because of its ancient and valuable library which holds the second largest collection of codices and manuscripts in the world, second only to the Vatican Library.
It contains some 3,500 volumes written in Greek, Coptic, Arabic, Armenian, Hebrew, Georgian, Syriac and other languages. It is remarkable a copy of the Ashtiname of Mohammed, a document in which the Islamic prophet grants protection to the monastery.

Information and Description of Saint Catherine’s Monastery

The monastery was named after St. Catherine of Alexandria, who was an Egyptian martyr of early Christianity, who suffered persecution and ultimately died at the hands of the Romans, because of her religious beliefs. It is also known as the Monastery of the Transfiguration or the Monastery of the Burning Bush.

The Monastery of St. Catherine was one of the great religious places of pilgrimage for more than 10 centuries.

The Library of the Monastery:

It is a large library that gave the monastery a great importance, second only to that of the Vatican in the number of codices and ancient manuscripts, in it you can find writings in Greek, Arabic, Coptic, Syriac, other languages of the region and European languages.

 Facts about Saint Catherine’s Monastery

1. Because the monastery has received for centuries countless pilgrims from all over the world. Inside the monastery there are also six wells, four springs and a large garden rich in fruit trees and two mills.
2. The monastery is a holy ground attraction and is considered a place of great importance to Christians, Jews and Muslims alike, for in all three traditions Moses is a respected and revered figure.
3. This holy place belongs to the Mount Sinai Orthodox Church, which is part of the Orthodox Church of Jerusalem.

St. Catherine Convent
In 1975, workers accidentally penetrated a wall and discovered behind it a treasure trove of some 3,000 additional manuscripts, including ancient biblical texts and other known but long-lost documents, along with a variety of artwork.
Among the finds were missing parts of the Codex Sinaiticus, 50 other incomplete and 10 nearly complete codices, among other Greek texts in uncial script that shed new light on the history of Greek writing.
Even more numerous documents were found in various Semitic, Afro-Asiatic (formerly Hamito-Semitic) and Indo-European languages, dating from the 6th century and earlier.

St. Catherine’s Monastery was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2002.