Tag Archives: St. Catherine’s Monastery

He recalled the sojourn with longing.

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By David Roberts, 1839

From Father Justin’s blog on the treasures and scenes of St Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai, I am sharing a link to his post from last year featuring a very old mosaic icon of the Prophet Hosea, from the sixth century. He writes in the comments:

“Roberto Nardi and his team of conservators recently carried out a major program to consolidate and clean and conserve the mosaic. From their detailed study, they became convinced that it is the work of artisans from Constantinople. The portrait medallions of the apostles around the arch, and the prophets around the base, are each very striking and individualized. An examination of the mosaic up close reveals surprising colour juxtapositions, that the artisans knew would blend together when the mosaic was seen from a distance. Every detail is a source of wonder.”

You can see Fr Justin’s close-up photo of the brilliant icon here: “The Prophet Hosea.” He says of the prophet that, “He recalled the sojourn in the wilderness with longing,” because during that period the Israelites were close to God, whereas in the time during which Hosea lived, their faith was weak.

This fresco below is not that mosaic icon, and is very different from it; I like its energy. It is featured in another article on the prophet here, which gives more of his story from the Bible: The Orthodox Times.

I hope you will take a look at Fr. Justin’s photo of the sixth century mosaic: Prophet Hosea.

The Holy Spirit at the peak of Mount Sinai.

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When the Getty Museum in Los Angeles hosted the exhibition “Holy Image, Hallowed Ground: Icons From Sinai” in 2006-07, the courier and caretaker of the artifacts on display was Father Justin Sinaites.

He is the librarian at Saint Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai, where the extremely dry climate has kept ancient manuscripts from deteriorating the way they might in many places in the world. This monk librarian came from Texas to the Egyptian monastery many years ago; at least once before I mentioned him on my blog after my late husband and I heard him speak in Berkeley, California.

As I write, the sun has set on this Sunday of Pentecost, a celebration full of joy and light. So we are now, according to Church Time, in the day after, on which the Orthodox Church celebrates Holy Spirit Day; Father Justin has written a blog post about how they keep the feast at St. Catherine’s: “Liturgy at the Peak of Mount Sinai”:

“Every year, we celebrate the Divine Liturgy at the peak of Mount Sinai on the day after Pentecost, the Monday of the Holy Spirit. This year, we were joined by pilgrims from Greece and Russia. We made the ascent in the night, and began the Liturgy at 4:00 AM.”

The blog post consists mostly of Fr. Justin’s own photographs, which I always find very appealing. I learned more about the monk himself in this interview on the Travel Potpourri website: “Saint Catherine’s Monastery Interview with the Librarian Father Justin.”

One paragraph:

“I didn’t go from El Paso, Texas, to Sinai, in one big step. There were lots of little steps. But even in El Paso, I read the account of Moses and the Exodus in the Bible. I saw Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Ten Commandments,” which contains scenes filmed at the traditional Sinai, with Charlton Heston climbing up the mountain, and walking along a ridge with the Sinai range in the background. Also, El Paso is a desert. I used to wander in the desert for hours and came to love the stark beauty of the desert landscape. All of this was in the background when I began to read about the history and the theology of the Orthodox Church.”

If you are interested in the manuscript collection itself, you may want to look at: This Reuters article, which explains that the abbot of the monstery feels an urgency about completing the project of digitizing all 4500 manuscripts in the library, many of which are in the Syriac and Arabic languages, and very rare.

But today, all I want to do is visit Fr. Justin’s blog, and through his photographs get another glimpse of the daily life and worship at Saint Catherine’s, Sinai.

Story of a Transfiguration icon.

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Feast of the Transfiguration of Christ

This mosaic dating from the 6th century is in the apse of the great basilica at St. Catherine’s Monastery, Mt. Sinai, built by Emperor Justinian before 565. I found it when I was looking at icons on the internet of Christ’s Transfiguration, which we commemorate today.

I also watched a fascinating video, the Conservation of the Transfiguration Mosaic, featuring an informal and entertaining lecture by an eminent Italian archeologist, conservationist and expert on mosaics, Roberto Nardi. It is informal in that he does not read a paper, but gives the best kind of commentary on the extensive video footage shown. The video is from 2012, so maybe I am one of the last to see it.

He starts with the history of the monastery, which he admits goes back to Moses and the burning bush, on through St. Helen and St. Justinian; the mosaic was installed soon after the church was built. In 1847 a Russian monk named Samuel did a huge amount of restoration work on the mosaic, and in 1957 archeologists sounded an alarm about its deteriorating condition, but it lasted 50 more years to the point where this 5-year project began. By then, 20,000 tiles were missing (though of course monks had saved them in boxfuls), which equaled 4% of the total, and a great number of the remainder were no longer actually attached to the base layer.

I could watch this video over and over, all the tedious detail work so well documented. What they did about the missing tiles (shown as white spots in the picture just above) was the outworking of a series of complex deliberations.  I hope you will check out at least a bit of the video, because I don’t know where to stop, telling you all the things about this long project that impress me. How the conservators came to learn to appreciate the experience and perspective of the monks — the ones who live with the icon and pray with it every day — was a touching part of the story. The pictures I show you are just teasers, blurry because I took them of the video on my desktop computer monitor.

Back in the U.S.A., our parish celebrated the feast with all the important elements intact. If you want to read more content on the feast itself you can find a lot from past years here. I don’t always get to be part of the procession through the church vineyard, and sometimes I have forgotten to bring a basket of fruit, but today I managed both!

The monks celebrating the Divine Liturgy under the icon of the Transfiguration at Mt. Sinai, and the Orthodox parishioners in California — we are all singing this hymn of the feast:

O Lord, we will walk in the light of Thy countenance,
and will exult in Thy Name forever.
(Ps. 88:15)

Icon of the Transfiguration, St. Catherine’s Monastery, Mt. Sinai