At St. Catherine's Monastery at the foot of Egypt's Mount Sinai, the silence in the library is broken only by low electrical humming, as an early manuscript is bathed in green light.
At St. Catherine's Monastery at the foot of Egypt's Mount Sinai, the silence in the library is broken only by low electrical humming, as an early manuscript is bathed in green light.
A team from Greece are photographing thousands of fragile manuscripts, including some of the earliest copies of the Christian gospels, using a complex process that includes taking images in red, green and blue light and merging them with computer software to create a single high-quality color picture.
There is a tangible sense of urgency to the mission.
Although the monastery has survived centuries of warfare, it lies in a region where Islamist militants have destroyed countless cultural artifacts and documents in Syria and Iraq. Egypt's Christian churches have also been targeted by an Islamist insurgency in the rugged and thinly populated northern Sinai.
Well, that's one way to commemorate the 29th of May, I guess....
Foreign Minister George Gerapetritis has told his Egyptian counterpart that “there is no room for deviation” on the common understanding rea
Despite the seriousness of the threat, the issue received little public attention and was initially mishandled diplomatically. A potentially
I could say a lot about Greece's diplomatic handling of the issue, but I also won't be silent on the fact that Greece is the only Western country who has an actual foreign policy about not only Saint Catherine's Monastery in Mount Sinai, but also the rest of the Orthodox Christian-Coptic antiquities and institutions still functioning in Egypt, despite little-known, little-cared about and longterm intense pressure and harassment (which HAS reached the state of state-ignored if not state-backed terrorism and pogroms on the Coptic/Christian populations).
Christians, Coptic or otherwise, in Egypt have been there almost immediately since first half of the 1st century A.D. (in religious terms, immediately after the historical death of Jesus). That is a 2,000 years presence of the religion and its varying sects, drawn not only from the Greeks (also of ancient presence in Egypt) and Romans, but also of the Pharaonic Egyptian population. Their monastic presence in Mount Sinai can be traced back to the 4th century AD, and Saint Catherine's Monastery was built by Emperor Justinian AND Empress Theodora, in the first half of the 6th century AD. Since then, it has had an uninterrupted presence and been a seminal center for both culture and Christianity in the general Near Eastern area. (It has also been of importance to Muslims and Jews in the region, and considered a meeting point of the three religious cultures. But I won't let this fact obfuscate the core issue that this has to do with the Monastery's Christian identity, the supremacy of which has never been questioned or diminished in any way.)
You might have noticed, if you happen to have even rudimentary historical knowledge, that all this happend at their latest a whole century before Islam ever came into existence, a century and a half before the Arabs even got a solid hold on Egypt. I am mentioning this, because this judicial decision from the Egyptian courts, pendingn for years and fruit of a bitter and intense battle for the complex's ownership between the monks and the Egyptian state, as you might read in the articles above, is not at all unconnected to the actions of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (the previous government, which was ousted by the current one of President Al-Sisi) , or the increased attacks and marginalization upon the non-Muslim populations, Copts among them the most long-suffering, which often takes the form of religious persecution and denial of their rights to religious freedom.
That, of course, has been met with the deepest silence and indifference by the wider world, but seriously one would have to be naive to expect something else of the "humanitarian watches" of the West, or worse, the Islamic states of the East.
Greece is at a very vulnerable state right now diplomatically, as its chief enemy and constant denier of its sovereign rights (denier of several historical crimes and at least four genocides too, but that's neither here nor there) in the region, Turkey, is not only networking with the states of the Levant (and Russia, and Iran, and the US, and Europe), but actively pursuing sensitive diplomacy concerning those sovereign rights with Egypt and Libya, hoping to basically divide economic and geopolitical opportunities in the Mediterranean by cornering Greece off (those who are familiar with the position of Greece in the map, will see why that's both preposterous and frankly ridiculous). I am mentioning this to explain, that Egypt is most certainly counting on Greece not reacting at this certain point in time due to the political pressures involved.
This is coming at the heels of Hagia Sofia in Istanbul being turned back into a mosque, which not only disregards its 1000-year old (for comparison, it has only been a mosque for less than 600 years) history as THE most important and magnificent church in the Romano-Greek Eastern Empire, aka Byzantine Empire, and Orthodox/Greek Christianity, but also led to the covering of its famous mosaics during prayer hours (including with lasers), some of them permanently inaccessible to tourists now, clearly compromising the archaeological and cultural importance of the monument.
Hagia Sophia is a Unesco-protected monument. Unesco did zilch to prevent or at least damage-control this travesty, except its usual lukewarm criticisms. In my opinion, neither the academic community's reaction has been satisfying in the least, much less the wider academic community's in Turkey, which proves that they are majorly politically-minded with their academic calling taking a backstage. I can't wait to see what Unesco will do for St. Catherine's at Sinai, also a protected monument, now that its monastic community will be ousted and its holdings and portable fortunes both seized by the Egyptian state. I did have high hopes for Egypt in the last years due to its innovative cultural politics, among others the excellent Archaeological Museum in Cairo, and its appearance of caring about the diverse and ancient historical heritage of the country, but to say this is disappointing is like saying the ocean is damp - its is both foreboding and enraging, and especially in a country which has had a negative record dealing with its Christian populations during the 20th century, like the little-talked about and propagandized even today as "voluntary" exodus of the Aegyptiote (Greek Egyptians, inhabiting Egypt since before Alexander's times) due to Nasser's nationalization policies.
I am just extremely done with a certain group of countries finding themselves being the curators of hugely significant and precious cultural treasures, stomping all over them and the world whistling away indifferent since no coverage is ever afforded these stories. Especially if those cultural treasures happen to be Christian ones.
