Catherine's Monastery (Sinai)

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Catherine's Monastery
UNESCO world heritage UNESCO World Heritage Emblem
Katharinenkloster Sinai BW 2.jpg
The Catherine's Monastery, 2010
National territory: EgyptEgypt Egypt
Type: Culture
Criteria : i, iii, iv, vi
Surface: 60,100 ha
Reference No .: 954
UNESCO region : Arabic states
History of enrollment
Enrollment: 2002  (session 26)
Catherine's Monastery (Sinai) (Egypt)
Paris plan pointer b jms.svg
Location in Egypt
Bell tower of St. Catherine's Monastery, behind which you can see the minaret of the mosque

Today's Greek Orthodox St. Catherine's Monastery ( Greek Μονὴ τῆς Ἁγίας Αἰκατερίνης , Arabic دير سانت كاترين) in Sinai in Egypt was founded between 548 and 565 and is one of the oldest still-inhabited monasteries of Christianity . It is located at the foot of Mount Sinai ( Mount Moses). According to tradition, there was the burning bush in which God revealed himself to Moses ; According to legend, the bones of St. Catherine of Alexandria , carried by an angel, are said to rest here, although there is no historical evidence of their existence. The monastery, which was originally dedicated to Theotokos , that is, Mary , the mother of Jesus , was named after the martyr Catherine in the west from the 14th century and in the east from the 19th century.

The Katharinenkloster is one of the oldest monasteries in Christendom. At the same time, it is a place where Jewish , Christian and Islamic cultural history meet . Because of its isolated location, the Katharinenkloster is one of the few monasteries that was never destroyed.

General

The complex with outbuildings and gardens is an average of 1585 meters above sea ​​level in southern Sinai near the village of Milga below the 2285 m high Sinai Mountain and the higher Jabal Katrina and has an area of ​​100 hectares. The actual monastery, built as a fortress, has a footprint of 76 × 85 meters.

Access is possible from Tarfet , where the approximately 1400 m high Watiya Pass has to be overcome. In order to maintain the monastery operation in view of the large number of visitors (around 50,000 annually), the opening times and the accessible areas of the monastery have been severely restricted. For visitors there is only one café with a few tables and benches in front of the door.

The monastery has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2002 .

history

The Catherine's Monastery from the ascent to Mount Sinai
The letter of protection of St. Catherine's Monastery ( attributed to Mohammed )

According to a local legend, the burning bush mentioned in the biblical story of Moses, which is linked to a divine apparition, was supposed to have stood there.

As early as the fourth century there were monks and a Chapel of Mary in this place. In the oldest source about the monastery, the chronicles of Patriarch Eutychios of Alexandria from the 9th century, Helena , the mother of Emperor Constantine , is mentioned as the alleged founder of the Lady Chapel.

Plan of St. Catherine's Monastery

The St. Catherine's Monastery was built in its still-preserved form during the reign of Emperor Justinian (527-565) to protect the monks and was surrounded by a fortress-like wall. Today's main church dates from this time. However, many monks continued to live as hermits or in small groups in the area and only went to the actual monastery when danger was imminent. Under Justinian, a chapel dedicated to Moses was built on the neighboring summit of Sinai .

Around the year 610, one of these hermits, who became known under the name of Johannes Klimakos , wrote the treatise The Ladder of Divine Ascent , one of the most influential works for Eastern Church spirituality, which still shaped many generations later monks and other pious people.

Legend has it that Mohammed was a guest of the monastery several times, even before he appeared as a prophet. After his political ascent, he is said to have written a letter to the monastery board, with which its continued existence in a now Muslim region was guaranteed. This guarantee was recognized by later Islamic rulers over the centuries and thus secured the existence of the monastery. This letter, the authenticity of which has been disputed, is now in a museum in Istanbul. Only a copy of this letter is in the Catherine's Monastery, issued by an Ottoman sultan.

When the caliph al-Hakim planned to destroy the monastery at the beginning of the 11th century, the monks - according to the monastery tradition - built a mosque with a minaret on the site near the church , although it does not reach the height of the 19th century church tower.

Even Napoleon Bonaparte was one for the monastery Schutzbrief written. The monastery was never attacked from its foundation until 2017 and was able to maintain its autonomy .

On April 18, 2017, a checkpoint in front of the monastery was attacked when several gunmen opened fire, killing one policeman and injuring three others. When the officers returned fire, the attackers were able to escape. The terrorist militia Islamic State admitted to the incident through its propaganda agency Amaq .

particularities

Together with the nunnery in Wadi Firan ( Pharan ) and a few families, mostly of Greek origin at the coastal town of at-Tur (Raitho), the Katharinenkloster forms the smallest of the autonomous Orthodox churches (see main article Orthodox Church from Mount Sinai ). The abbot of the monastery is also the archbishop of Sinai, Pharan and Raitho . Juridically , Sinai is subordinate to the Patriarchate of Jerusalem , as it is located in the old province of Palestine Salutaris . The new abbot chosen by the monks of the monastery is consecrated as archbishop by the Jerusalem patriarch.

Library

The monastery library, consisting of four library rooms, is probably the oldest surviving Christian library. It contains six thousand manuscripts in Greek , Syrian , Old Ethiopian , Arabic , Georgian and Church Slavonic , three thousand of which are from antiquity and some older than the monastery itself - a collection that is only surpassed by that of the Biblioteca Vaticana . Most of these books still have their original covers , unlike Western libraries where the original covers have usually been replaced.

In May 1844 the Leipzig theologian Konstantin von Tischendorf visited the monastery for research purposes. There he discovered the Codex Sinaiticus from the 4th century, the oldest almost completely preserved Bible manuscript. There are different versions of Tischendorf and Monastery of the modalities of how this codex came to Cairo and Moscow. The monks are demanding the return of the manuscript to this day.

As a result, the monks were much more cautious with their manuscripts. Agnes Smith-Lewis was only allowed to copy the old Syrian NT manuscript discovered there in 1892 .

In the meantime, the most important manuscripts have been filmed by Americans (1950) and Israelis (1967/8) and are therefore widely accessible to scholars. Of course, this does not apply in the same way to the new discoveries of 1975; but they are by no means inaccessible on site today.

Icon collection

The monastery has a collection of over 2000 icons , including some of the few that survived the Byzantine iconoclasm of the 8th and 9th centuries undamaged due to the situation in the Islamic empire and are therefore among the oldest icons still in existence (see Acheiropoieta ) .

literature

  • The Monastery of Saint Catherine at Mount Sinai.
    • George H. Forsyth , Kurt Weitzmann : The church and fortress of Justinian. Ann Arbor 1973.
    • Kurt Weitzmann: The icons. Vol. 1: From the sixth to the tenth century. Ann Arbor 1976.
    • Kurt Weitzmann, George Galavaris: The illuminated Greek manuscripts. Vol. 1: From the ninth to the twelfth century. Ann Arbor 1990, ISBN 0-691-03602-0 .
  • John Galey, Kurt Weitzmann: The Katharinenkloster on the Sinai. Belser, Stuttgart 1980, ISBN 3-7630-1243-5 ; 2003; 2010, ISBN 978-3-763-02561-9 .
  • Helen C. Evans: Trésors du Monastère de Sainte-Catherine, Mont Sinai, Egypt. Fondation Pierre Gianadda, Martigny 2004, ISBN 2-88443-085-7 .
  • Jürgen Gottschlich : The Bible hunter. The adventurous search for the original version of the New Testament. 2nd Edition. Christoph Links Verlag, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-594-2 . [1] This page was created with the support of St. Catherine's Monastery.
  • John Galey: The St. Catherine's Monastery on Sinai. Christoph Belser Society for Publishing Business GmbH & Co.KG, Stuttgart 2014, ISBN 978-3-7630-2691-3 .
  • Ulfrid Kleinert, Rolf Kühn: And they moved to a desolate country. On the trail of the Bible through Sinai. Scientific Book Society and Primusverlag, Darmstadt 2011, ISBN 978-3-89678-757-6 .
  • Alexander Schick: Tischendorf and the oldest Bible in the world - The discovery of the Codex Sinaiticus in the Katharinenkloster. Jota Verlag, Muldenhammer 2015, ISBN 978-3-935707-80-0 (biography on the 200th birthday of Tischendorf with a large number of previously unpublished documents from his estate).
  • Gunnel Katharina Wahlström: The Katharinenkloster near Mosesberg in Sinai - A world of tolerance. Edition Hagia Sophia, Wachtendonk 2014, ISBN 978-3-937129-78-5 .

Web links

Commons : Saint Catherine's Monastery, Mount Sinai  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files
Wikivoyage: Catherine's Monastery  - travel guide

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ UNESCO World Heritage Center: Saint Catherine Area. Retrieved September 29, 2017 .
  2. ↑ Brandie Ratliff: The monastery of Saint Catherine at Mount Sinai and the Christian communities of the Caliphate. Sinaiticus. The bulletin of the Saint Catherine Foundation (2008) ( Memento of the original dated February 13, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.saintcatherinefoundation.org
  3. ↑ SPIEGEL ONLINE: Egypt: One dead in the attack on St. Catherine's Monastery. Retrieved April 20, 2017 .
  4. ↑ Christfried Böttrich : The find of the century. Discovery and history of the Codex Sinaiticus . Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, Leipzig 2011, ISBN 978-3-374-02586-2 .


Coordinates: 28 ° 33 ′ 21 ″  N , 33 ° 58 ′ 32 ″  E