The Court of Egypt ruled that the country’s authorities have the right to expropriate the monastery of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai, the oldest in the world, the continuously acting Orthodox monastery.
The authorities of Egypt plan to turn the monastery into a tourist object, evicting 20 Orthodox monks living in a monastery from it, which caused an angry reaction of Greece.
The monastery founded in the 6th century is in the jurisdiction of the Jerusalem Patriarchate, and not the Alexandria Patriarchate based in Egypt.
The library of the monastery, founded in the VI century, has about 1.8 million manuscript sheets. Her collection of religious manuscripts is second only to the Vatican library. According to the Arabic and Turkish manuscripts, one can judge the life of the monks at the time when the monastery was an Orthodox island in the ocean of medieval Islam.
The monastery stores books on Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Coptic, Amhar, Georgian and Armenian. In his collection – the Syrian Code of the 5th century, the VI century manuscript with a fragment of the Gospel of Matthew, the oldest psalter in the Slavic language, written in the XI century.