{"id":222,"date":"2003-06-06T23:31:32","date_gmt":"2003-06-07T06:31:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stefangeens.com\/?p=222"},"modified":"2003-06-06T23:31:32","modified_gmt":"2003-06-07T06:31:32","slug":"mo-moses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/2003\/06\/mo-moses\/","title":{"rendered":"Mo' Moses"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

I took some pictures on a family jaunt to St. Catherine’s Monastery in the summer of 2002. The trip itself was blogged here<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n


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\nThis picture and the next give a great overview of the interior of the monastery. (Warning: Full size is huge, ~2MB)<\/span><\/p>\n


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\nSee if you can spot the parents.<\/p>\n


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\nThe 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.<\/p>\n


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\nThe shortcut to Mount Sinai is through the gully on the left. The path is hard to see.<\/p>\n


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\nThis is the postcard shot.<\/p>\n


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\nA detail of the fortified wall, seen from the interior (bottom left corner of the monastery in the above shots).<\/p>\n


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\nThe 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n


\n(Medium<\/a> \/ Full<\/a>)<\/span><\/p>\n


\n(Medium<\/a> \/ Full<\/a>)<\/span>
\nAgain, a detail of the fortified wall. Same bit, but from a different angle.<\/p>\n


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\nThe back end of the church.<\/p>\n


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\nSunlights hits the valleys around Mount Sinai soon after sunrise, as seen from the summit.<\/p>\n


\n(Medium<\/a> \/ Full<\/a>)<\/span>
\nA 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.)<\/p>\n


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\nI’m kind of wishing this image was in color, but the landscape silhouette is purer this way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-222","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-photography"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7eNhC-3A","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=222"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}