ISTANBUL (RNS) — Archbishop Damianos of St. Catherine’s Monastery announced his intention to step down on Thursday (Sept. 4), the latest development in a saga surrounding the ancient Orthodox Christian site at the foot of Mount Sinai in Egypt that has embroiled political authorities from Cairo and Athens and patriarchates of Jerusalem, Constantinople and beyond.
Founded in the sixth century by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian the Great, St. Catherine’s is considered the world’s oldest continually operated Christian monastery, a UNESCO world heritage site and home to a vast library of relics, icons and manuscripts dating back over a millennium.
However, in May, an Egyptian court issued a ruling that Orthodox leaders argued effectively nationalizes the monastery’s lands and endangers its monks’ way of life.
“The Egyptian courts decided that they would basically take away the property rights of the monastery, which is absolutely unprecedented. The Monastery in Sinai has existed under Muslim rule for — well, the entire history of muslim rule,” Samuel Noble, a scholar of Orthodox Christianity at Aga Khan University in London, told RNS.
“Now the Egyptian state steps in and decides that they own the property rights to it and the monks only have usufruct rights,” he continued. “That’s a catastrophe in a lot of ways. Both for the monastery itself and its ability to function as something other than a tourist site, …