Saint Catherine's Monastery

Saint Catherine's sits in a narrow valley among the granite mountains of southern Sinai, at the foot of the peak traditionally identified as Mount Sinai. Its walls were built in the sixth century and it has been occupied by monks continuously ever since.

It is one of the oldest working Christian monasteries in the world.

Continuity. Very few institutions anywhere have operated without a break for fifteen hundred years, and the monastery's survival through every change of ruler in the region is remarkable in itself. It holds a document traditionally regarded as a grant of protection from the Prophet Muhammad, and a mosque stands inside its walls beside the church.

The icon collection is extraordinary. Because Sinai lay outside Byzantine control during the iconoclastic period, when religious images were being destroyed across the empire, the monastery kept encaustic icons from the sixth and seventh centuries that survive nowhere else. Several are on display.

The library is one of the most important manuscript collections in the world, comparable to the Vatican's in significance if not in size.

And there is the bush. A living bramble in the courtyard is identified by tradition as the burning bush of Exodus.

The site was a place of Christian pilgrimage from the fourth century. The fortified monastery was built under the emperor Justinian in the sixth century, and the original church, its doors and its apse mosaic survive.

It was named for Saint Catherine of Alexandria, whose relics tradition says were brought here.

The Codex Sinaiticus, one of the oldest substantially complete manuscripts of the Christian Bible, was found here in the nineteenth century; most of it is now in the British Library.

The library's fame rests on more than one famous book. It holds thousands of manuscripts in Greek, Arabic, Syriac, Georgian and Slavonic, and modern multispectral imaging has been recovering erased texts beneath later writing — palimpsests — including works that survive nowhere else.

The mosque inside the walls tells the story of the monastery's long accommodation with Muslim rulers: converted from a guesthouse in the Fatimid period, it served the Bedouin who worked for the monastery. The Jabaliya tribe of the surrounding valleys still trace their descent, by tradition, to the garrison families Justinian settled here to protect it.

• The sixth-century Church of the Transfiguration and its mosaic
• The icon gallery, with encaustic icons that survived iconoclasm
• The burning bush in the courtyard
• The mosque within the monastery walls
• The library and its manuscript collection
• The granite mountain setting