In A Small Chapel Adjoining The Church Is Shewn The Place
Where The Lord Is Supposed To Have Appeared To Moses In The Burning
Bush; It Is Called Alyka [Arabic], And Is Considered As The Most Holy
Spot In Mount Sinai.
Besides the great church, there are twenty-seven
smaller churches or chapels dispersed over the convent, in many of which
daily masses are read, and in all of them at least one every Sunday.
The convent formerly resembled in its establishment that of the Holy
Sepulchre at Jerusalem, which contains churches of various sects of
Christians. Every principal sect, except the Calvinists and Protestants,
had its churches in the convent of Sinai. I was shewn the chapels
belonging to the Syrians, Armenians, Copts, and Latins, but they have
long been abandoned by their owners; the church of the Latins fell into
ruins at the close of
[p.543] the seventeenth century, and has not been rebuilt. But what is
more remarkable than the existence of so many churches, is that close by
the great church stands a Mahometan mosque, spacious enough to contain
two hundred people at prayers. The monks told me that it was built in
the sixteenth century, to prevent the destruction of the convent. Their
tradition is as follows: when Selim, the Othman Emperor, conquered
Egypt, he took a great fancy to a young Greek priest, who falling ill,
at the time that Selim was returning to Constantinople, was sent by him
to this convent to recover his health; the young man died, upon which
the Emperor, enraged at what he considered to be the work of the
priests, gave orders to the governor of Egypt to destroy all the
Christian establishments in the peninsula; of which there were several
at that period. The priests of the great convent of Mount Sinai being
informed of the preparations making in Egypt to carry these orders into
execution, began immediately to build a mosque within their walls,
hoping that for its sake their house would be spared; it is said that
their project was successful and that ever since the mosque has been
kept in repair.
This tradition, however, is contradicted by some old Arabic records kept
by the prior, in which I read a circumstantial account how, in the year
of the Hedjra 783, some straggling Turkish Hadjis, who had been cut off
from the caravan, were brought by the Bedouins to the convent; and being
found to be well educated, and originally from upper Egypt, were
retained here, and a salary settled on them and their descendants, on
condition of their becoming the servants of the mosque. The conquest of
Egypt by Selim did not take place till A.H. 895. The mosque in the
convent of Sinai appears therefore to have existed long before the time
[p.544] of Selim. The descendants of these Hadjis, now poor Bedouins,
are called Retheny [Arabic], they still continue to be the servants of
the mosque, which they clean on Thursday evenings, and light the lamps;
one of them is called the Imam.
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