Saint Catherine's Monastery

Saint Catherine's Monastery stands at the foot of Mount Sinai in Egypt, on the site where Moses is said to have seen the burning bush. Empress Helena, mother of Constantine the Great, built a chapel over the bush in the fourth century, and between 548 and 565 Emperor Justinian I enclosed it within a great fortified monastery.

The supposed body of Catherine of Alexandria, martyred in the early fourth century, was later brought there, and her relics made it a major pilgrimage centre, after which the house was renamed in her honour. Its library became one of the richest in Christendom, holding the fourth-century Codex Sinaiticus.

A Fatimid mosque was built within its walls in 1106. Under Ottoman rule the once multiethnic community became almost entirely Greek, sustained from the 1480s by alms from the princes of Wallachia.