Saint Catherine's Monastery

At the foot of the holy mountain

Saint Catherine's Monastery stands in a high valley of the southern Sinai, at about 1,570 metres, at the foot of Mount Sinai (Gebel Musa), where tradition places the giving of the Law to Moses. It is one of the oldest continuously inhabited Christian monasteries in the world. Monks and hermits lived here from the fourth century around the site identified as the Burning Bush, and in the mid-sixth century the Byzantine emperor Justinian built the fortified monastery whose massive granite walls still enclose it. It belongs to the Greek Orthodox Church and is dedicated to St Catherine of Alexandria, whose relics, according to tradition, were found on a nearby mountain. Together with the surrounding mountains, it forms the UNESCO World Heritage Site of the Saint Catherine Area.

Inside the walls

The heart of the monastery is the Basilica of the Transfiguration, built under Justinian, whose apse holds a celebrated sixth-century mosaic of the Transfiguration of Christ, one of the finest early Byzantine mosaics in existence. Behind it, the Chapel of the Burning Bush is built over the place where God is believed to have spoken to Moses, and a bramble growing outside its wall is venerated as a descendant of the bush itself. Within the walls also stand a Fatimid-era mosque, built in the early twelfth century and testimony to centuries of coexistence, and the Well of Moses.

Icons and manuscripts

Because of its remoteness and its protection by successive rulers, the monastery preserved treasures lost elsewhere: a collection of icons that includes some of the oldest in the world, from the sixth and seventh centuries, painted in encaustic and survived the Byzantine Iconoclasm, and a library considered one of the most important collections of early manuscripts in the world, second only to the Vatican's. The Codex Sinaiticus, one of the oldest complete manuscripts of the Bible, was kept here until the nineteenth century; most of it is now in the British Library. Some of these treasures are displayed in the monastery's museum, the Sacred Sacristy.

The monastery lies about 3 km from the town of Saint Catherine in South Sinai, about 2.5 hours by road from Sharm el-Sheikh or Dahab, and longer from Cairo. From the car park, walk up to the walls and enter through the small gate on the north side; the Basilica and the Burning Bush are inside, close together.