Saint Catherine Monastery
— — a monastery that has not closed its doors since the sixth century.
Not only on a wall.
“A walled monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai, founded by the emperor Justinian I between 548 and 565. Greek Orthodox monks have kept continuous prayer there for more than fourteen hundred years. The site holds one of the world's oldest libraries, a bush identified by tradition as the Burning Bush, and a collection of Byzantine icons that survived because the iconoclasm never reached the Sinai. Pilgrims still climb the mountain before dawn.
Saint Catherine Monastery, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Saint Catherine's Monastery sits at roughly 1,550 meters elevation in a narrow valley at the foot of Jebel Musa (Mount Sinai by tradition) on the Sinai Peninsula, in Egypt's South Sinai Governorate. The monastery was built between 548 and 565 by order of the Byzantine emperor Justinian I and has been continuously inhabited by Greek Orthodox monks ever since, making it the oldest working Christian monastery in the world. It was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2002, together with its surrounding desert landscape of granite peaks and wadis.
The original sixth-century granite walls, ten to fifteen meters tall, still stand around the monastery, with later additions of a basilica, refectory, and the famous library. The Church of the Transfiguration retains its sixth-century timber roof beams and an apse mosaic of the Transfiguration dated to roughly 565. The library holds about 3,300 manuscripts in twelve languages, second only to the Vatican in age and importance for Christian texts. The fourth-century Codex Sinaiticus was identified here by Constantin von Tischendorf in the nineteenth century.
Because the iconoclasm of the eighth and ninth centuries never reached the Sinai, Saint Catherine's holds a collection of pre-iconoclastic icons without parallel: roughly two thousand icons in total, including some of the earliest known panel paintings of Christ and the saints. The remoteness that preserved them still defines the site. The nearest town, Saint Catherine City, sits at the end of a single mountain road, about three hours by car from the Red Sea coast at Dahab. The resident monks number around twenty.