I took some pictures on a family jaunt to St. Catherine’s Monastery in the summer of 2002. The trip itself was blogged here. I have just recently gotten myself a film scanner, so I made some hi-res scans of the more architecturally expository pictures, as well as some landscape shots. It’s not really meant as art; I took these more out of an impulse to document.

(Medium / Full)
This picture and the next give a great overview of the interior of the monastery. (Warning: Full size is huge, ~2MB)

(Medium / Full)
See if you can spot the parents.

(Medium / Full)
The path leading up the broad valley to the left leads, eventually, to Mount Sinai. There is also a shortcut directly up the gully behind the monastery.

(Medium / Full)
The shortcut to Mount Sinai is through the gully on the left. The path is hard to see.

(Medium / Full)
This is the postcard shot.

(Medium / Full)
A detail of the fortified wall, seen from the interior (bottom left corner of the monastery in the above shots).

(Medium / Full)
The church is on the left, the mosque is in the middle. it might seem odd to find a mosque in an Orthodox Christian monastery, but it’s one of the reasons the monastery has survived 1,500 years of Muslim rule. Attacking a mosque was not something Muslim rulers condoned. Also, there was a letter from Mohammed putting the monastery under his protection, but the letter may not, it is now conceded, have been as authentic as advertised at the time.

This last trick may no longer work for warding off religiously inspired acts of destruction, but perhaps architects should consider putting a church, synagogue and mosque atop all future skyscrapers.

(Medium / Full)

(Medium / Full)
Again, a detail of the fortified wall. Same bit, but from a different angle.

(Medium / Full)
The back end of the church.

(Medium / Full)
Sunlights hits the valleys around Mount Sinai soon after sunrise, as seen from the summit.

(Medium / Full)
A closeup of one of the gulleys. It may not be Ansel Adams, but at least I do have a gibbous moon in the image. (I wish black and white images were not restricted to 256 levels of gray on computer screens, especially now that scanners do 16-bit scans.)

(Medium / Full)
I’m kind of wishing this image was in color, but the landscape silhouette is purer this way.