St Catherine's Monastery and Mount Sinai

1. What St Catherine's Monastery Is

St Catherine's Monastery is a Greek Orthodox monastery in the southern Sinai Peninsula in Egypt, enclosed by high granite walls at the head of a narrow valley, standing at the foot of Jebel Musa, the mountain of Moses. The walls were raised in the sixth century on the order of the emperor Justinian, around a chapel that already marked the place venerated as the site of the Burning Bush of Exodus 3. Monks have lived inside them continuously since, through the Arab conquest, the Crusades, Mamluk and Ottoman rule, and the wars of the twentieth century, and the community holds services in a church whose roof beams still carry sixth-century inscriptions.

Three things make the monastery matter beyond its own liturgy. It holds an icon collection that includes encaustic panels painted before the outbreak of Byzantine iconoclasm, which survive because Sinai lay outside imperial reach when the icons elsewhere were being destroyed. It holds a manuscript library that specialists in the field consistently place among the most important collections of early Christian codices anywhere, in Greek, Arabic, Syriac, Georgian, Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopic and Slavonic. And it stands at the foot of a mountain that Jews, Christians and Muslims all associate with the giving of the Law.

What a visitor actually does is short and physical. You arrive at the gate in a valley of red and grey granite with almost nothing growing in it. You are shown the bramble growing against a wall, the church, the mosaic in the apse, the reliquary of St Catherine, and, depending on the day and the community's own schedule, the icon gallery. Then you look up at the mountain and decide whether to climb it. For the wider question of why Christians travel to places at all, see our guide to what a pilgrimage is.

This page is about the site. The theology of Moses, the covenant and the Decalogue belongs to our profile of Moses and the giving of the Law, which treats the events themselves; here the concern is the place they are remembered in, and what is standing on it now.

2. Sinai in Scripture

Sinai appears in the Bible as the place where God makes himself known by name and binds a people to himself by covenant. The mountain is called Sinai in some books and Horeb in others, and the two names are generally taken to refer to the same range or the same peak. Three encounters shape the site's memory, and all three are visible in what the monastery keeps.

The Burning Bush

Moses is keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro when he leads it beyond the wilderness to Horeb, the mountain of God, and sees a bush burning without being consumed (Exodus 3:1-2). God calls him by name from the bush, tells him to take off his sandals because the ground is holy, and sends him to Pharaoh. When Moses asks what name he should give, the answer is the one the whole later tradition turns on.

The Catechism treats this revelation of the divine name as a central moment of God's self-disclosure, given to Moses in the theophany of the burning bush (CCC 204-206). The monastery is built around that verse as much as around anything else, and the removal of shoes at the door of the chapel behind the sanctuary is a direct citation of Exodus 3:5.

The Giving of the Law

In the third month after leaving Egypt the people camp before the mountain, and God descends on it in fire and smoke and a sound like a trumpet, with the people warned not to touch the boundary (Exodus 19:16-20). Moses goes up, and comes down with the Decalogue (Exodus 20:1-17), and later with the tablets written by the finger of God (Exodus 31:18). Below, the people make the golden calf, and the tablets are broken and then renewed (Exodus 32 and 34). The covenant made here is the one the New Testament reads Christ as fulfilling.

Elijah at Horeb

Centuries later the prophet Elijah, in flight from Jezebel and wanting to die, is fed by an angel and walks forty days and forty nights to Horeb, the mountain of God, and lodges in a cave (1 Kings 19:8-9). A great wind, an earthquake and a fire pass by, and the LORD is in none of them. What comes after is rendered in older English as a still small voice and in newer versions as a gentle whisper or a sound of sheer silence (1 Kings 19:11-13). The place on the mountain called Elijah's Basin, where the two ascent routes meet, keeps that episode, and there is a chapel of the Prophet Elijah there. Our profile of the prophet Elijah takes the episode further.

Sinai in the New Testament

St Paul uses Sinai twice as a term of comparison. In Galatians he reads Hagar allegorically as the covenant from Mount Sinai, in Arabia, corresponding to the present Jerusalem in slavery, against the Jerusalem above who is free (Galatians 4:24-26). The Letter to the Hebrews sets the terror of the mountain that could be touched, with its fire, darkness, storm and trumpet, against what Christians have come to instead.

Those two passages are why a Christian standing in Sinai is standing in a place the New Testament treats with reverence and with distance at the same time. Section 16 returns to that.

3. Is Jebel Musa the Mountain of the Law?

Jebel Musa is the traditional identification of biblical Mount Sinai, and the tradition is old, continuous and geographically specific, without being a matter of Church teaching. The Catholic Church has never defined where Mount Sinai is, and no inscription, excavation or artefact has settled it.

What Fixes the Traditional Site

Christian hermits were living in these valleys by the third and fourth centuries, and they were living here because they believed this was the mountain. The pilgrim account of Egeria, written in the 380s, describes arriving in the valley, being received by monks, climbing the mountain, being shown the place of the bush with a church already standing at it, and being shown the cave of Elijah on the way up. That is a detailed itinerary of the present site two centuries before Justinian's walls, and it matches the ground. When the emperor built, he built where pilgrims were already going.

The Other Candidates

Several alternatives have been proposed, and stating them fairly is more useful than defending the traditional site by ignoring them.

The Har Karkom identification is the published proposal of Emmanuel Anati, who has excavated and surveyed the site and set out the case in his own publications; it has not been generally accepted. The north-western Arabia proposals circulate largely outside the academic literature. This table reports positions and the arguments their holders make for them, and takes no view on the Exodus route.

What a Pilgrim Should Do With This

Nothing in Catholic faith depends on the coordinates. The Church venerates places because human beings are bodily and memory attaches to ground, and the veneration terminates in the God who acted there. A Christian who climbs Jebel Musa is climbing the mountain that the Church has climbed for at least sixteen centuries in memory of the covenant, and that is a good and sufficient reason to climb it. Certainty about the survey coordinates would add nothing to the prayer said at the top.

4. The Hermits, Egeria, and Helena's Chapel

The monastery is the third stage of Christian occupation on this spot, and the first two are worth knowing because they explain why Justinian built here at all.

The Hermits

From the third century onward, ascetics settled in the valleys of southern Sinai, living in caves and small cells scattered across the wadis, coming together on Saturdays and Sundays for the liturgy. The pattern is the same one found in the Egyptian deserts covered in our guide to Egypt's Coptic holy sites, and the two regions were in contact. Sinai was dangerous. Early accounts describe raids in which monks were killed, and the community's memory of martyrdom at Sinai and at Raithu on the coast is old and specific. The walls Justinian built were a response to a real problem.

Egeria

The Spanish or Gallican pilgrim Egeria, who travelled in the early 380s and wrote an account of it for the women of her community at home, gives the earliest detailed description of the site. She arrives in the valley, is met by monks and priests, is told that the summit can only be reached on foot, climbs it, hears the passage of Scripture read at the top, is shown the cave of Elijah, and afterwards is taken to the place of the bush, where she records a church already standing and a garden. Her surviving text is incomplete, and what remains is one of the most valuable documents in the history of Christian pilgrimage.

The itinerary summarised here follows the surviving portion of the Itinerarium Egeriae, the pilgrim account attributed to Egeria and generally dated to the early 380s, which is preserved incompletely in a single manuscript found at Arezzo in 1884. Details of her route and identity remain debated among scholars.

Helena's Chapel

The monks' own tradition, repeated in the monastery's published accounts, holds that the empress Helena, mother of Constantine, had a chapel built at the site of the bush in the early fourth century, together with a tower where the monks could shelter during raids. That chapel is understood to be the building Egeria saw. It stood where the Chapel of the Burning Bush now stands, behind the sanctuary of the main church, and Justinian's builders enclosed rather than replaced it.

5. Justinian's Fortress and the Walls

The walls of St Catherine's Monastery are the reason everything inside them still exists. They were built in the sixth century by order of the emperor Justinian, in dressed granite quarried nearby, forming an irregular quadrilateral that follows the slope of the ground, and they have enclosed a working monastic community ever since without a break in occupation.

Why an Emperor Built a Fort in a Desert

Justinian's building at Sinai belongs to the same programme as his other frontier works: a garrison point that also served the faith, protecting a community of monks whose settlement was exposed to raiding and marking imperial presence at the edge of the empire's reach. The sixth-century historian Procopius, in his work on Justinian's buildings, records the emperor constructing a church and a fort at Sinai for the monks, and notes that the fort was garrisoned. The monastery therefore begins as a defended enclosure with a church inside it, and its later history is largely the story of that enclosure not being breached.

The attribution of the walls and the church to Justinian rests on Procopius, On Buildings V.8, and on the dedicatory inscriptions carved into the wooden roof beams of the church, which name Justinian and the empress Theodora. Because Theodora is commemorated in terms that suggest she had died, the beams are generally dated after 548 and the complex to the years around the middle of the sixth century.

What the Walls Are Like

The masonry is heavy and unornamented, rising in places to a considerable height on the downhill side and much less on the uphill side, with towers at the angles and along the faces, and later repairs plainly visible as changes in the stone. For centuries the original ground-level gate was walled up and access was by a small high door reached by a rope and a winch from a projecting tower, so that visitors and supplies were hauled up in a basket. The winch survives. The present entrance is a small door on the north-west side, and the crowding of the buildings inside, the church, the cells, the refectory, the mosque, the gardens and the reservoir, into so tight a space is a direct consequence of the wall never having been extended.

The Well and the Garden

Inside the walls is a well the monks identify with the well at which Moses met the daughters of Jethro (Exodus 2:15-17), and beyond the enclosure is a walled garden of cypresses, olives and fruit trees, kept alive by irrigation in a valley that produces nothing on its own. At the edge of the garden is the charnel house, where the bones of deceased monks are kept after their remains have lain in the cemetery, since the ground available for burial is very small. Visitors who are shown it are shown the ordinary Orthodox monastic practice of keeping the dead close, and the skeleton of a monastery porter, vested and seated, is kept there.

6. The Church of the Transfiguration

The main church of the monastery, the katholikon, is dedicated to the Transfiguration of Christ, and it is the sixth-century basilica built under Justinian, still roofed by its original timbers. It is a three-aisled basilica with granite columns, a narthex, side chapels, and a sanctuary at the east end. Almost everything that matters at the monastery is inside it or immediately behind it.

The Mosaic in the Apse

In the conch of the apse, above the altar, is a sixth-century mosaic of the Transfiguration: Christ in a mandorla of light, Moses and Elijah on either side of him, and the apostles Peter, James and John below, thrown down. Around it run medallions of prophets and apostles, and on the wall above are scenes of Moses at the bush and Moses receiving the Law. The mosaic is one of the very few surviving monumental mosaics of the age of Justinian, and its preservation is close to miraculous by the standards of what happened to comparable work elsewhere.

The dedication and the mosaic together are a piece of theology sited on purpose. The Transfiguration, recounted in Matthew 17:1-8, Mark 9:2-8 and Luke 9:28-36, has Moses and Elijah standing with the transfigured Christ. Those two men are, in the Old Testament, precisely the two who encountered God on this mountain. Putting that scene in the apse of the church at the foot of Sinai says that the man who saw the back of God's glory here and the prophet who heard the still small voice here both stand beside Christ on another mountain, and that the Law and the Prophets find their meaning in him.

The Doors, the Beams, and the Iconostasis

The church keeps its original sixth-century wooden doors, carved and still hanging, and a second set of doors at the narthex from the Fatimid period. The roof beams carry carved dedicatory inscriptions naming the emperor Justinian, the empress Theodora, and the architect who built the church, and they are the primary dating evidence for the whole complex. The iconostasis screening the sanctuary is a later work of the seventeenth century, hung with icons, and the marble floor and much of the interior fitting also belong to later centuries. A visitor is looking at a sixth-century shell furnished across fifteen hundred years of continuous use.

The Reliquary of St Catherine

In the sanctuary, on the south side, stands a marble reliquary containing what the monastery venerates as the head and a hand of St Catherine of Alexandria. Pilgrims are commonly given a ring by the monks in her memory. Section 8 covers who she was and how her name came to the mountain.

7. The Chapel of the Burning Bush

Behind the sanctuary of the katholikon, reached from the side, is the Chapel of the Burning Bush, the oldest continuously venerated point in the whole complex and the reason the monastery is here. Its altar stands over the place identified as the roots of the bush, so that the altar table is set above the spot of the theophany rather than over a relic, which is an unusual arrangement.

Taking Off Your Shoes

Visitors remove their shoes before entering the chapel, in obedience to the words spoken to Moses at this place: do not come any closer, take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground (Exodus 3:5). The gesture is small and it lands. Nothing else in a Christian building asks the same thing, and doing it in a bare stone room decorated with lamps and tiles gives a person a very direct sense of what the passage is describing. The chapel is not always open, and access depends on the community's own schedule.

The Bush Itself

Outside, growing against a wall of the enclosure at a level above the chapel, is a large evergreen bramble, botanically a Rubus sanctus, and the monks identify it as descended from the bush of Exodus, moved from the original site and kept alive by the community. It is a real plant and it is green in a valley with no vegetation in it, which by itself explains a good deal of the site's persistence in the imagination. The monastery does not claim that the living stems are those Moses saw, and pilgrims are asked not to pick at it, a request the plant's condition shows is not always honoured.

The Bush in Christian Reading

Eastern Christian tradition reads the bush that burns without being consumed as a figure of the Virgin Mary, who bore God without being destroyed, and the monastery's icons of the Virgin of the Burning Bush make that reading visible. The Latin tradition knows the same figure, and it appears in the liturgy and in patristic commentary. Both traditions also read the bush as a statement about God himself: a fire that gives without diminishing, and a presence that can be approached only barefoot.

8. St Catherine of Alexandria and the Name

The monastery was not originally called St Catherine's. For its first several centuries it was known as the Monastery of the Transfiguration, or the Monastery of the Bush, and the change of name belongs to the medieval period and to the story of her relics.

Who She Is Said to Have Been

St Catherine of Alexandria is venerated as a young Christian woman of noble family at Alexandria in the early fourth century, learned in philosophy, who confronted the emperor over the persecution of Christians, argued down the philosophers assembled to refute her and converted several of them, refused marriage to the emperor, was tortured on a spiked wheel that broke, and was beheaded. Her cult was enormous in the medieval West, where she was counted among the Fourteen Holy Helpers and named as one of the voices heard by Joan of Arc. Her feast falls on 25 November. Our profile of St Catherine of Alexandria covers her life and the historical questions about it in full.

The earliest surviving accounts of St Catherine's life date from several centuries after the events they describe, and historians regard the details of her passion as legendary in form. Her cult is ancient and her veneration is not in question; the biographical particulars are. Her feast was reduced to an optional memorial in the revision of the Roman calendar in 1969 and restored to the calendar as an optional memorial in 2002.

How Her Name Reached Sinai

The monastery's tradition holds that angels carried her body from Alexandria to the highest peak of the Sinai range, where centuries later the monks were led to it and found the remains incorrupt and giving off fragrant oil. They brought the relics down into the church, and the peak took the name Jebel Katherina, the mountain of Catherine, which it still carries as the highest mountain in Egypt. From the eleventh century onward, and above all through the traffic of Crusader-era pilgrimage, devotion to St Catherine spread rapidly in Western Europe, and the monastery came to be known by her name across Christendom.

Why This Matters for the Site

The renaming is a good example of how a holy place accumulates. Sinai was already the mountain of Moses and of Elijah, and the church was already dedicated to the Transfiguration. A martyr's relics were added, a second mountain took her name, western pilgrims came for her rather than for the Law, and the compound name that resulted is what people search for today. Nothing was displaced. The bush, the Law, the prophet and the martyr are all still in the same enclosure.

9. The Icons and Why They Survived

St Catherine's holds one of the oldest and largest collections of icons in the world, including panels painted in encaustic, pigment suspended in hot wax, in the sixth and seventh centuries. Panels of that date survive in almost no other place, and the reason they survive here is historical accident of a very particular kind.

Iconoclasm and the Accident of Geography

In the eighth and ninth centuries the Byzantine Empire went through two periods of iconoclasm, in which imperial policy held the veneration of images to be idolatry and religious images were destroyed on a large scale. The controversy was settled at the Second Council of Nicaea in 787, which affirmed the veneration of images while distinguishing it from the worship owed to God alone, and the restoration of images was finally confirmed in 843. During those decades of destruction, Sinai was under Muslim rule and outside the reach of the imperial edicts. The monks kept their panels because the officials who would have burned them could not get to them.

What Is in the Collection

The best known of the early panels is a bust of Christ Pantocrator, Christ the ruler of all, in encaustic, in which the two halves of the face are markedly different in expression and which is frequently read as a deliberate rendering of the two natures of Christ in one person. Also of the sixth or seventh century is a panel of the Virgin and Child enthroned between St Theodore and St George with two angels behind, and a panel of St Peter. Later centuries added a very large body of Byzantine, post-Byzantine, Georgian and Crusader-period icons, including western work made for Latin pilgrims, which makes the collection a record of the whole span of Christian image-making in the East.

The dating and description of the early encaustic panels follow the published scholarship on the Sinai collection, principally the survey work carried out at the monastery by the University of Michigan, Princeton and the University of Alexandria expeditions from the 1950s onward and the catalogues that came out of them. The reading of the asymmetry of the Pantocrator face as a statement about the two natures of Christ is an interpretation offered by art historians, and the painter made no such claim. UNESCO's World Heritage inscription of the Saint Catherine Area describes the monastery's holdings of early Christian icons and manuscripts as outstanding; the ranking of the icon collection among the oldest and largest anywhere is the assessment of the art historians who have catalogued it.

The Catholic Position on Images

Catholic teaching on sacred images is the teaching of Nicaea II, and it is worth stating plainly for readers who have been told otherwise. The honour given to an image passes to the one it represents, and whoever venerates an image venerates the person depicted in it. The Catechism sets this out directly, treating the veneration of images as a consequence of the Incarnation, since the God who became visible may be depicted (CCC 1159-1162, 2131-2132). Adoration belongs to God alone. A Catholic in the icon gallery at Sinai is looking at the oldest surviving evidence of a practice his own Church defends.

10. The Library and the Codex Sinaiticus

The monastery's library holds several thousand manuscripts and a large collection of early printed books, and specialists in early Christian codices regularly describe it as one of the two or three most significant such collections in existence. The manuscripts are in Greek above all, and also in Arabic, Syriac, Georgian, Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopic, Slavonic and Latin, which is a fair map of the languages in which Christianity was actually written east of the Mediterranean.

Descriptions of the library's rank rest on the assessments of the institutions that have catalogued and imaged it, including the Library of Congress microfilming expedition of the 1950s, the St Catherine's Foundation, and the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library. Published counts of the manuscripts vary with what is being counted, and this page gives no single figure.

The Codex Sinaiticus

The Codex Sinaiticus is a Greek Bible written on parchment in the fourth century, one of the two oldest substantially complete manuscripts of the Christian Scriptures, alongside the Codex Vaticanus in Rome. It was written in a large, careful hand in four columns to the page, and it contains, in addition to the Old and New Testaments, the Epistle of Barnabas and part of the Shepherd of Hermas, which is direct evidence of how the boundaries of the canon were still being worked out in the fourth century. Our guide to the deuterocanonical books covers the canon question, and our guide to the Bible covers how the text has come down to us.

Tischendorf and the Dispute

The German biblical scholar Constantin von Tischendorf visited the monastery in 1844 and left with a number of leaves, which he published and deposited at Leipzig. He returned in 1853 and again in 1859, and on that last visit, travelling under Russian patronage, he obtained the substantial body of the manuscript and it went to St Petersburg, where it remained until the Soviet government sold it to the British Museum in 1933. The circumstances of the 1859 removal have been contested ever since. Tischendorf presented the manuscript as a gift to the Tsar from the monastery; the monastery has maintained that it was a loan, that the receipt Tischendorf signed promised its return, and that it was never given away. The British Library's own published position acknowledges that the acquisition remains disputed.

The account here follows the joint documentation published by the Codex Sinaiticus Project, a partnership of the British Library, Leipzig University Library, the National Library of Russia and St Catherine's Monastery, which digitised the dispersed leaves together and publishes the differing accounts of the manuscript's removal side by side rather than adjudicating between them.

The New Finds of 1975

In 1975 a fire in a chapel led to the discovery of a walled-up room beneath the north wall of the monastery containing a large quantity of manuscripts and fragments, including further leaves of the Codex Sinaiticus itself. The discovery is known as the New Finds, and it added substantially to what the library holds and to what is known of the codex.

The Palimpsests

Many Sinai manuscripts are palimpsests, parchment scraped clean and written over because parchment was expensive. Since 2011 the Sinai Palimpsests Project, working with the monastery and using multispectral imaging, has recovered erased undertexts from these books, including classical and medical texts otherwise lost, and writings in languages with very small surviving corpora, among them Caucasian Albanian and Christian Palestinian Aramaic. Work of that kind is why the library keeps producing news fifteen centuries after the walls went up.

The Sinai Palimpsests Project is conducted by the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library with St Catherine's Monastery and the University of California, Los Angeles, and publishes its results and its imaging methods openly. The particular recoveries named here are drawn from that project's own published announcements.

11. The Mosque Inside the Walls

A small mosque stands inside the monastery enclosure, close to the church and facing the bell tower, converted in the Fatimid period from an earlier building. Visitors are frequently startled by it, and the explanation is straightforward: a Christian monastery that survived a thousand years of Muslim rule did so by arrangement, and the mosque is one of the arrangements.

What the Mosque Is

The building was adapted for Muslim use in the eleventh or twelfth century. The usual account given by the monastery and repeated in the literature is that the conversion was carried out under Fatimid rule as a protective measure, making the destruction of the compound politically difficult and giving Muslim visitors and the local Bedouin a place to pray. It has a minaret, and it stands lower than the bell tower beside it, a juxtaposition that is photographed constantly and that says something reasonably accurate about how the place has actually functioned.

The Ashtiname

The monastery keeps a document known as the Ashtiname, a charter of protection for the monks of Sinai attributed to the Prophet Muhammad and said to have been granted in the seventh century, guaranteeing their safety, their churches and their exemption from certain taxes. The original is said to have been taken to Constantinople by the Ottoman sultan Selim I after 1517, with certified copies left at the monastery, and copies were repeatedly confirmed by later rulers. Historians dispute whether the document goes back to the Prophet, and many regard the surviving copies as later productions. What is not disputed is that Muslim rulers over many centuries treated the monastery as protected and issued their own decrees to that effect, and that the community survived where a great many others did not.

The Ashtiname's authenticity is contested in the scholarly literature, with arguments turning on the form of the text, its seal, and the date of the surviving copies. This page reports the monastery's custody of the document and the historical fact of repeated protective decrees by Muslim rulers, and takes no position on whether the charter originates with the Prophet.

Christians and Muslims on the Same Mountain

Islam venerates Musa, Moses, as a prophet, and the Quran narrates the encounter at the burning valley. Muslims have therefore visited this mountain for as long as Christians have lived on it, and the summit carries a mosque as well as a chapel. Catholic teaching on Islam is set out in the Second Vatican Council's declaration Nostra Aetate, which states that the Church regards Muslims with esteem, noting that they adore the one God, submit to his decrees, and honour Jesus as a prophet and Mary his virgin mother, while the Council is equally clear that Muslims do not acknowledge Jesus as God. Our guide to Islam and Christianity works through the agreements and the real disagreements without flattening either.

12. The Church of Sinai and Its Archbishop

St Catherine's Monastery is the whole of an autonomous Orthodox Church. The Church of Sinai consists of the monastery, its dependencies, and the small territory around it, and it is headed by the Archbishop of Sinai, Pharan and Raithu, who is at the same time the abbot of the monastery. In territory and in numbers it is the smallest of the churches of the Eastern Orthodox communion, amounting to one monastery, its dependencies and the ground around it.

How That Works

The archbishop is elected by the monks of the community and is consecrated by the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, which is the link that keeps the autonomy inside the order of the wider Orthodox communion. The monastery holds dependencies, called metochia, outside Sinai, historically in Cairo and elsewhere in Egypt, in Greece, in Cyprus and further afield, which have supported the community materially for centuries. Our guide to the autocephalous and autonomous Orthodox churches explains the difference between autocephaly and autonomy and where Sinai sits within it.

Eastern Orthodox, Not Oriental Orthodox

The monks of Sinai are Eastern Orthodox and Greek in liturgical tradition, in communion with the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople and the other Eastern Orthodox churches. They are not Coptic. The Coptic Orthodox Church, which is the large indigenous Christian body of Egypt and holds the great monasteries of Wadi Natrun and the Red Sea, belongs to the Oriental Orthodox family, which received the first three ecumenical councils and did not receive the Council of Chalcedon of 451 in the form in which it was promulgated. The two families are not in communion with one another. A Greek Orthodox monastery in Egypt is therefore an unusual thing, and the distinction matters to the people who keep it. See our guides to the Eastern Orthodox Church and to the Oriental Orthodox churches, and to the Coptic Orthodox Church for the Egyptian body specifically.

A Note on the Monastery's Legal Position

The status of the monastery's property and its holdings in the surrounding area has been the subject of legal proceedings and public discussion in Egypt, and the matter attracted international attention in 2025, with the Egyptian presidency stating publicly that the monastery's status and its religious character would be preserved, and the Greek government engaging with Egypt over it. Anything more specific than that would date quickly. A reader who needs the current position should consult the monastery's own statements and current reporting rather than a guide page.

13. The Bedouin of the Mountain

The people who live around the monastery are Bedouin of the Jebeliya tribe, whose name means people of the mountain, and their relationship with the community is old, formal and mutual. Their own tradition, shared by the monastery, holds that their ancestors were settled here by Justinian in the sixth century to serve and protect the monks, and that they were Christians who later became Muslim while keeping the relationship intact.

What the Relationship Looks Like

The Jebeliya have supplied the monastery with labour, guides, camel handling and protection for centuries, and the monastery has provided food, work and a fixed point in the local economy. Pilgrims who climb the mountain will meet Jebeliya guides on the path, and visitors who buy anything in the valley are dealing with the same families. Treating them as scenery is a mistake, and treating a guide's fee as an imposition is worse. They are the reason the route is passable.

Why It Belongs in a Pilgrimage Guide

Pilgrimage that leaves the people at the site poorer and more annoyed than it found them has failed at something the Church regards as basic. The corporal works of mercy do not switch off at the airport, and a pilgrim's conduct toward the people who carry the water is part of the pilgrimage rather than an interruption of it. Our guide to what a pilgrimage is sets out the tradition on this, which is considerably more demanding than most modern itineraries assume.

14. Climbing Jebel Musa

Jebel Musa rises directly behind the monastery, and two routes go up it. Both end at the same summit, where a small chapel of the Holy Trinity and a mosque stand within a few metres of each other on a rocky top with very little room on it. Most people who reach the summit do so in the dark, in order to be there at sunrise.

The Camel Path

The longer route, known as the camel path or Siket El Bashait, winds up the eastern side of the mountain on a broad graded track laid out in the nineteenth century, climbing steadily by switchbacks. It is the easier of the two in gradient and the longer in distance, and camels can be hired for part of it, which is where the name comes from. The path ends at a saddle called Elijah's Basin, and from there the final ascent is on foot for everybody.

The Steps of Repentance

The other route is a staircase of rough granite blocks cut into the mountainside, running up a steep ravine directly behind the monastery. It is called the Steps of Repentance, and tradition credits it to a single penitent monk who cut the steps as an ascetic labour. Published counts of the steps vary with where the counting starts, and the figure most often repeated is about three thousand seven hundred and fifty. They are irregular, unequal in height and hard on the knees in both directions. Many pilgrims go up the camel path and come down the steps, which is easier on the lungs and harder on the legs.

Elijah's Basin and the Summit

Where the two routes meet is a wide hollow with a very old cypress tree in it, called Elijah's Basin, and here stands a chapel of the Prophet Elijah with a small chapel of Elisha beside it. The cave shown as the one in which Elijah sheltered (1 Kings 19:9) is here. From the basin a final flight of several hundred steps climbs to the summit. On the top, a chapel of the Holy Trinity, built in 1934 on the ruins of a sixth-century church, encloses the rock from which the tablets of the Law are said by tradition to have been cut, and it is normally kept locked. A mosque stands beside it.

Doing It as a Pilgrimage

The climb is done overnight by most groups, which means walking for hours in cold and dark, arriving at a crowded summit, and coming down in heat. What turns that into a pilgrimage rather than a hike is deciding in advance what will be prayed and when. A workable pattern: the ascent in silence, or with the Rosary said slowly by the group, Exodus 19 read aloud at Elijah's Basin, the Ten Commandments read at the summit before sunrise with a pause after each, and the descent given to examination of conscience against the ten. A group that settles the prayers in advance comes down with the mountain in its memory. Our guide to prayer and its forms is a starting point if the group has no shape of its own.

15. A Catholic at an Orthodox Monastery

A Catholic visiting St Catherine's is a guest in an Eastern Orthodox house, and the ordinary courtesies are worth knowing in advance because they prevent almost every awkward moment that occurs here.

What a Guest Does

Dress modestly and cover shoulders and knees. Follow the community's directions about which areas are open, since a working monastery is a home before it is a heritage site and the parts a visitor sees are the parts the monks have chosen to open. Ask before photographing anything, and expect the answer to be no inside the church and the icon gallery. Keep silence in the church. Remove your shoes at the Chapel of the Burning Bush without being asked twice. Venerating an icon by a bow or a kiss is entirely proper for a Catholic and is the practice the Church defends at Nicaea II.

The Eucharist

A Catholic does not receive communion at an Orthodox liturgy without regard to the Orthodox Church's own discipline, which does not admit non-Orthodox to the chalice. Catholic law makes provision for reception from Orthodox ministers in narrow circumstances of genuine need, and it also requires that this be done in a way that respects the discipline of the Eastern churches, which in practice means asking rather than presuming. The plain course at Sinai is to attend, to pray, to venerate, and not to approach the chalice. Antidoron, the blessed bread distributed at the end of the Divine Liturgy, is a different matter and is commonly offered to all present.

Two Traditions in One Room

Standing in a sixth-century church at the foot of Sinai, a Catholic is in the presence of a tradition that kept the icons when the empire burned them, kept a Bible older than the schism, and kept the liturgy going through fourteen centuries of Muslim rule without a break. The Second Vatican Council's decree on the Eastern churches and its decree on ecumenism both speak of the Eastern churches' liturgical and spiritual patrimony with explicit honour and call the whole Church to know it better. The visit is an opportunity to do exactly that.

16. Sinai, Tabor, and Zion

Sinai has a specific place in Christian theology, and the church at its foot states it in the apse. The mountain of the Law is real, it is honoured, and the New Testament reads it as the beginning of something completed elsewhere.

The Three Mountains

What That Means for a Visit

Christians do not go to Sinai to put themselves back under the terror of the mountain. They go because the God who spoke there is the same God, because the Law given there is still binding as the Decalogue the Church teaches, and because the place makes an abstraction physical. The Catechism treats the Ten Commandments as a privileged expression of the natural law, given at Sinai and confirmed by Christ, and binding still (CCC 2058, 2070, 2072). The mountain is where that started. Walking up it is a way of taking it seriously.

The mosaic in the apse is the whole argument in one picture, and it was put there in the sixth century by people who had climbed the mountain outside. Moses on one side, Elijah on the other, Christ transfigured between them in light. The Law and the Prophets are honoured and they are also standing beside someone.

If You Cannot Go

Sinai is remote, the journey is long, and access depends on conditions that a guide page cannot speak to. The Church has never taught that presence at a site is required for the grace of the mystery remembered there. Reading Exodus 3 in a quiet room with your shoes off, or reading the Decalogue slowly once a week for ten weeks, is available to anyone, costs nothing, and is closer to what the mountain is for than a photograph from the summit. Our guide to virtual pilgrimage sets out how to keep a pilgrimage from home in a way the tradition recognises. For the wider region, see our guide to Holy Land pilgrimage sites, and for other great monastic destinations, our guides to Orthodox monasteries for pilgrims, Mount Athos and the Meteora monasteries.

None of that preparation has to be bought. The Church attaches nothing to a purchase: no grace, no indulgence, no protection, and no standing before God. Pro is study and audio material that saves a reader the labour of assembling the Sinai texts, the commentary and the prayers alone. Read Exodus from a borrowed Bible on the coach and you have lost nothing.

17. Frequently Asked Questions