Impressions from the Library of St. Catherine's Monastery on Mount Sinai
Author: Tulvi-Hanneli Turo
Number: Anno 2022/2024
Category: Education
In April 2022, I had a great opportunity to take a long-awaited trip to St. Catherine's Monastery and its oldest continuously operating library in the world. The monastery is located at the foot of Holy Mount Horeb (Moses) on the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt, where, according to the Old Testament, God revealed himself to Moses and gave him the Ten Commandments.
The Sinai Peninsula with its wonderful mountains and desert habitats is also a very exciting place for hiking. Many tourists use of the opportunity to climb to the top of Mount Moses at dawn or sunset for a spectacular view of the entire mountain range. That's what I did with my travel companion, the book conservator Dorel Sabre, after visiting the library in the first half of the day. This pilgrimage destination at the topis at an altitude of 2,285 meters and the journey there begins at St. Catherine's Monastery. Since 2002, the monastery has been protected by UNESCO as a sacred site uniting three world religions – Christianity, Islam and Judaism. It is famous for its archaeological monuments and places of religious significance, Byzantine architecture, outstanding early Christian manuscripts and a valuable icon collection. (ref 1)⁽¹⁾
About the history of the monastery
Mount Sinai, or Mount Moses, has been a destination for pilgrims and ascetics since the 3rd century. During the reign of Roman Emperor Constantine the Great, from 306 to 337, the persecution of Christians ceased and Christianity began to be favored. In the 4th century, communities of monks appeared in this area. They were supported by Empress Helena Augusta, mother of Constantine the Great, who in 330 had the first church built here (the Chapel of the Burning Bush, also the Chapel of St. Helena). The monastery was founded by the Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian I, during whose reign in 527–565 it was turned into a fortress with high walls. Justinian settled a few hundred families of Bedouin tribes in the monastery to protect it from barbarian invaders. This is how a distinctive Christian community arose, which still exists today. Originally, the monastery was international – here, besides the Greek-speaking monks, there were also Slavs, Arabs, Armenians, Ethiopians, Syrians and representatives of other nations. During the reign of Islam, the monastery became Greek-speaking. Since the 9th century it has been known as St. Catherine's Monastery. (ref 2)⁽²⁾, (ref 3)⁽³⁾
Monastery library
The monastery library is generally closed to visitors. Our access to the library and meeting with the monk Justin became possible thanks to a letter I had sent a few months earlier asking for an audience and an opportunity to get acquainted with the library. On the agreed day and time, the high doors of the ancient monastery library opened to us and we had a rare opportunity to enter the treasury of the bookbinding culture. Only monks from the monastery, who currently number 14 souls, have free access to the library. Heritage researchers and specialists can only be admitted by prior agreement.
The administrator of the library is the American-born erudite clergyman Father Justin, who has been very interested in Byzantine culture from an early age. Since 1996, he has been living in the monastery as a monk. He has a number of important jobs on his shoulders such as researching the collection of codexes and parchment rolls, digitizing, writing projects and submitting financial applications. He is proficient in several languages, knows the history of monasticism and Christianity, runs a spiritual blog and conducts Orthodox worship services. In his conversations, the pure mind and immediate presence of his monastic life, honesty as well as the subtle art of conversation were clear to see.
During the library visit, we had the opportunity to take a close look at and browse one of the rarities with parchment leaves – the Armenian-bound gospel presented to the monastery in 1583 by the Romanian Prince of Wallachia Mihai Viteazul. The front cover of the Gospel is covered with a silver plate the size of the whole cover, depicting evangelists and saints. The beautiful and magnificent endband of the volume, braided with different coloured and golden threads, left us utterly speechless, not to mention the miniatures of the gospel's ornamental initial letters and the embellishments within the text. This is the work of an unusually talented, great master. The condition of the volume was excellent – after all, it has been used relatively little, as it is a luxury volume, an expensive gift.
The library of St. Catherine's Monastery houses a collection of ancient codexes and manuscripts, the second largest in the world after the Vatican Library. It is also noteworthy that since the first day of the monastery's founding in the 6th century, the library of St. Catherine's Monastery on Mount Sinai has never closed its doors or been the victim of destruction.
The rarest part of the library of St. Catherine's Monastery consists of 3,300 manuscripts which are predominantly in Greek. The rest of the manuscripts are mainly in Arabic, Syriac, Georgian and Slavonic languages. The library also has manuscripts in Polish, Hebrew, Ethiopian, Armenian, Latin and Persian. Most of them are Christian texts that have been and still are used in worship. The collection also includes classical Greek texts, lexicons, medical texts, and travelogues.
Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Syriacus
The best-known manuscript in the monastery's library is the Codex Sinaiticus. It is the oldest Greek manuscript dated to the second quarter of the 4th century, containing the whole of the New Testament and fragments of the Old Testament. (ref 4)⁽⁴⁾ Twelve pages and a few dozen fragments of this complete work have survived in the monastery. Although the Codex Sinaiticus was found as early as the 18th century, it is considered to have been discovered by the German biblical scholar Konstantin von Tischendorf (1815–1874). On his first visit to the monastery in 1844, he managed to sneak out and take to Germany forty-three folio sheets of the codex and published them there as a facsimile in 1846. These handwritten parchment folio sheets are now kept at the University of Leipzig. On an expedition sponsored by Tsarist Russia in 1859, Tischendorf found more pages of the codex and asked permission to borrow them and publish them in Russia. Instead of returning, the rarities ended up in the Russian National Library. In 1933, the government of Soviet Russia decided to sell part of the rare find to England for £100,000, a huge sum of money for the time. At present, this part of the Codex Sinaiticus is one of the greatest treasures of the British Library. Russia kept eight fragments of pages that currently belong to the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg. Tischendorf justified the taking of the manuscripts by stating that the precious codex could have been burned in the hands of the monks. The monastery has refuted this slander, feeling sad that the original of the codex has now been scattered around the world in four different places.
The next manuscript in order of importance is the Codex Syriacus. It is a palimpsest, i.e. a parchment from which previous inscription has been blurred or deleted and a new one has been written over it. The later writing of the manuscript dates from 778, with the original writing dating from the 5th century. It is one of two manuscripts known in the world where the Gospels are written in Old Syrian.
The monastery library contains some manuscripts written on papyrus and a large collection of Greek, Arabic and Turkish scrolls. There are also about 8,000 early printed books here, of which 7,000 are in Greek. These are scriptures, patristic or 2-8th-century Christian thinkers' (so-called church fathers') teachings, texts from the classical period of ancient Greece and Orthodox worship books. Among the publications are the first editions of the works of Homer and Plato, from 1488 and 1513, respectively. The collection also includes many Greek-language printings by the famous Italian printer Aldus Manutius (1449–1515).
The ancient library at the foot of Mount Sinai still functions in its original context, as a library for a living monastic community. This adds an important extra meaning to every manuscript and early printed book. Many volumes have inscriptions and footnotes that testify to the use of texts for studies and for prayer as well as worship services that have been held here for more than seventeen centuries. In addition, they confirm the erudition and dedication of the monks.
Ligatus and the Binding Thesaurus
The library of St. Catherine's Monastery has been looked after by the Ligatus research and science centre based at the University of London. Its employees study, digitize and, if necessary, conserve the monastery library's property. The aim of Ligatus is to provide a wider community of professionals with vocabulary and professional information related to bound volumes that will help to professionally describe historical volumes of great cultural value.
The main project of the centre is the evaluation of the manuscripts in the monastery library and their condition. To do this, conservators travel two or three times a year to conduct on-site assessments. Books are evaluated individually on the paper form of the volume condition survey. (ref 5)⁽⁵⁾, (ref 6)⁽⁶⁾ To date, over 90% of manuscripts have been reviewed. The collected information will be transferred to a database containing approximately 33,000 A4 pages of condition survey results and 35,000 digital photographs of manuscript volumes. To use the database, permission from the monastery is required.
The research center's name Ligatus – the word ligatus means “tied” or “bound” in Latin – refers to another field of work of researchers and bookbinding historians/conservators. This is the creation and integration of a virtual thesaurus, a large dictionary that captures the entire professional vocabulary into digital data management systems. The dictionary known as The Language of Binding Thesaurus (LoB) is being updated constantly. Conservators from different countries have begun translating it into other languages as well. (ref 7)⁽⁷⁾
The Binding Thesaurus provides a unified terminology that can be used by all people working with historical books, such as conservators, paleographers, cataloguers, librarians, historians and professionals working with rare books. The thesaurus can also be used as a learning tool to get to know the structures, materials and binding parts of volumes. The thesaurus has been translated into seven languages and the easiest way to find information is to use alphabetical search.
The Ligatus research centre cooperates with other institutions and research groups such as the Centre for the Study of the Book and the Bodleian Science Library at the University of Oxford, the Department of Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts at the University of Cambridge, the Museum of Byzantine Culture in Thessaloniki, the Institute of Byzantine Studies in Athens, Greece, the Institute of Conservation (ICON). More information about Ligatus's activities can be found on their website: www.ligatus.org.uk
In conclusion, visiting the library of St. Catherine's Monastery and hiking in the Sinai Mountains was an exceptional and memorable event.
References
Karl-Kristjan Nigesen, Jebel Musa – Sunrise on the Holy Mountain, 21.04.2006
https://www.estravel.ee/blog/jebel-musa-paikesetous-puhal-mael/ ↩︎St. Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai https://www.sinaimonastery.com/index.php/en/ ↩︎
Alar Laats has written about the complex history of the monastery in the journal Kirik ja Teoloogia (Church and Theology), 2016, 13.05. https://kjt.ee/2016/05/vanad-patriarhaadid-jeruusalemma-ja-siinai-mae-ortodoksne-kirik/Information about it can also be found in the world guide to pilgrimages: https://et.sacredsites.com/Aafrika/Egiptus/mount_sinai.html ↩︎
Codex Sinaiticus, the oldest manuscript in Greek containing the complete New Testament and fragments of the Old Testament: https://codexsinaiticus.org/en/ ↩︎
Volume condition assessment form (on paper): https://www.ligatus.org.uk/sites/default/files/form20050110.pdf ↩︎
Instructions for completing the volume condition assessment form: https://www.ligatus.org.uk/sites/default/files/manual20050110.pdf ↩︎
The thesaurus is known as The Language of Binding Thesaurus (LoB). Alphabetical list of concepts by preferred label: https://www.ligatus.org.uk/lob/alphabetical ↩︎