Saint Catherine's Monastery

A fortified monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai, inside granite walls built in the 6th century and never breached. Monks have lived here continuously since, which makes this one of the oldest working Christian communities on earth — and, unusually, one that has survived every change of ruler in the region without interruption.

Inside the walls

• The Church of the Transfiguration, 6th century, with its original carved wooden doors and roof beams still in place
• The apse mosaic of the Transfiguration, contemporary with the building and one of the great works of early Byzantine art
• The Burning Bush — a living bramble in the courtyard, identified by tradition as the bush of Exodus
• The icon gallery, holding the oldest icons in existence
• A mosque inside the monastery walls, built in the 11th century and still standing

Opening hours are short and it closes to visitors on Fridays, Sundays and feast days. Dress modestly; it is a monastery first.

The Emperor Justinian ordered the fortress and church built around 548–565 CE, enclosing a chapel that already stood at the site associated with Moses and the burning bush. The walls were as much about protecting the monks from raiders as about marking the place.

Why the icons survived

In the 8th and 9th centuries the Byzantine empire destroyed religious images on a vast scale during the iconoclast controversy. Almost no painted icons from before that period exist anywhere — except here. Sinai had passed out of Byzantine control by then, so the order never reached it.

The result is a collection of encaustic panels from the 6th and 7th centuries, including a Christ Pantocrator of extraordinary subtlety, painted in hot wax. They are the oldest icons in the world, and they exist because this monastery was, at the crucial moment, outside the reach of the empire that built it.

The library

St Catherine's holds one of the most important manuscript collections in existence — around 3,300 codices, second only to the Vatican for ancient Christian texts, in Greek, Arabic, Syriac, Georgian, Armenian and other languages.

It was here in the 1840s and 50s that Constantin von Tischendorf identified the Codex Sinaiticus, a 4th-century Bible containing the oldest complete New Testament known. How he obtained it remains contested; most of it is now in the British Library, and the monastery's account of the transaction differs sharply from his.

The charter

The monastery preserves a document it calls the Ashtiname — a charter of protection said to have been granted by the Prophet Muhammad, guaranteeing the monks' safety and exempting them from tax. Its authenticity is debated by historians, but the practical effect is not: successive Muslim rulers honoured it for fourteen centuries, which is a substantial part of why the monastery is still here.