The icons of St Catherine

I was not supposed to take any pictures of the exhibits in the St Catherine museum. This was their 'piece de resistance.' The exhibits in the museum is only a fraction of what they really have. St Catherine monastery has in its possession half of the Orthodox church's icons and ancient manuscripts. The thousands of icons that survive at St Catherine are among the greatest treasures of the Orthodox world. When the Orthodox church rejected the veneration of icons in the eighth and ninth centuries, Sinai was already under Islamic control and thus the Byzantine state could not force the destruction of its icons. As a result St Catherine regents in their possession numerous and valuable icons. However even though they were saved from destroying their icons, they were susceptible to theft, theft by 'scholar' who visited. The famous case is the one involving Dr Tschendorf, who stole numerous leaves of the Sinai bible or Codex Sinaiticus, which were in turn sold to the Tzars of Russia. These were in turn sold by Stalin to the British Library. Today many pages of the Codex Sinaiticus are in the British Library which rightly belonged to St Catherine monastery. Whatever I saw was impression and as usual my only regret is the little time I had to take it all in!