The keeper of the Sinai codices

Father Justin appears as a withdrawn, introspective and serene man.

But this lanky monk with a long white beard and dusty clothes from the Santa Catalina Monastery, one of the oldest working Christian convents in the world, can't help but smile when he talks about the treasures he protects in his library.

Nestled in a canyon in the shadow of Mount Sinai, in the south of the peninsula of the same name in Egypt, the remote monastery, with some twenty chapels, was built in 565 by Emperor Justinian to protect a temple built two centuries earlier near from where it is believed that Moses would have received the ten commandments.

Since then, it has never been abandoned.

In the past, the monastery's treasured manuscripts were kept in three places: copies of the gospels and books needed for worship often slept in a warehouse in its small but opulent church;

the works that the monks could borrow to read, in a central enclosure;

and the oldest codices, in a tower north of the convent.

“In 1734, a bishop with a great interest in the library reserved a series of rooms in the central part of the monastery and requested that all the manuscripts be collected there.

We can place the modern origin of the library at that time ”, explains Father Justin, who gives an air to Albus Dumbledore, the old wizard of Harry Potter.

Father Justin is the only monk, of the 25 who live in the convent, who is in charge of guarding its library, today one of the oldest in the world in uninterrupted service.

Inside, there are no less than 3,306 manuscripts in 11 languages, 12,000 ancient books - 8,000 in Greek and 1,000 in Latin - and 10,000 printed volumes.

“I don't think a great community has ever lived here.

How is it then that a library with thousands of manuscripts has been assembled?

Well, it is partly because [the monastery] has never been destroyed, so it is a slow accumulation over the centuries.

But it is also because Sinai has been the destination of pilgrims from all over the world, who sometimes stayed here and produced manuscripts, ”explains the monk.

In part, this gradual accumulation process has been possible thanks to the area's desert climate, conducive to conservation, but above all it is due to the isolation of the convent.

"Even in 1890 a caravan was needed from Suez, the nearest city, with camels, supplies, porters and guides, and ten days through the desert, to reach the monastery," says Father Justin.

"This isolation ended in the sixties and seventies, when a road was built and many people began to come every day, which poses challenges to the monastery that did not exist before," adds the religious.

Despite the infrastructure that today connects the place with the rest of Egypt, reaching it still requires a tortuous journey of at least six hours and some police controls

from Cairo.

Only a tired daily public bus connects you to a nearby town.

Between 2009 and 2017, the library was renovated, and today it is located on the upper floor of the south wing of the convent.

The work introduced two main changes.

First the manuscripts were placed in the lower level of the room and the printed books in a raised gallery.

Second, a plan was devised to preserve the most precious works in special protective boxes.

"At that time we asked ourselves what was worth keeping in a box and established several categories: if the manuscript has Byzantine binding, if it is over a certain age, if it has illuminations or if it is significant in any other way, we would keep it in a box", he recalls Father Justin.

"By the time we apply the categories, of the 3,300 manuscripts we decided to save 2,000," he remembers laughing.

“No library has two-thirds of its collection in boxes.

But this one deserves it because here they are very old and relevant ”.

EL PAÍS is the first medium to report on this conservation project.

To select these 2,000 works, the library relied on extensive documentation of their manuscripts conducted between 2001 and 2006 by a team led by a renowned book preservation expert, Nicholas Pickwoad.

Then, it was thought which type of boxes would be the most suitable.

After discarding the archival cardboard and cloth used by most libraries, as well as wood, since they are not suitable materials for the local climate, it was decided to make them from stainless steel.

All the boxes, similar in aesthetics to those of bank security, are tailor-made for each manuscript, which is protected inside by a second cardboard wrapper, and cost on average 850 euros each.

Finally, a heritage preservation expert, Thanasis Velios, developed a computer program to determine the most efficient configuration when placing the boxes.

"Most of the libraries are very full and could not put 2,000 manuscripts horizontally," explains Father Justin, who also highlights that in his case the greatest threat to the conservation of books is not humidity, unlike what it usually occurs in libraries in large European cities.

"Some conditions here cannot be reproduced," he acknowledges, "but perhaps we can serve as a precedent for other libraries to implement something similar."

The first 200 boxes arrived at the monastery on June 25 and another 200 should do so by the end of this month of November.

For now, the project, which will run over several years, has secured funds for "several hundred" boxes.

It is funded by the London-based Santa Catalina Foundation and partner organizations in New York and Geneva.

HEMEROTECA

• Manuscripts discovered at Sinai by Greek monks (1978)

Around 1997, Father Justin began to take digital images of the manuscripts on his own in order to document them, but it was between 2012 and 2017 when, thanks to another conservation project, it was possible to photograph 78 in high resolution.

In 2018 the convent received new funds from the American Ahmanson Foundation and the British Arcadia Fund to do the same with the manuscripts in Arabic and Syriac, work that should be completed in 2021. The monk advances that some thousand manuscripts will thus be accessible through Internet and calculates that it is "realistic" to think that it would take only another seven years to extend the process to the rest of the library.

“Many people say that the Sinai library is the second [most important library in the world] after the Vatican archives.

That's true for Greek manuscripts, as only the Vatican has more, ”says Father Justin.

"But for intact ancient bindings and ancient Syriac and Christian Arab manuscripts, the one from Sinai may be the most important."

The palimpsests, a hidden gem

Among the relics in the library are books for worship, homilies and texts on ancient medicine.

But one of the jewels in the collection - and one of Father Justin's favorites - is the

.

This work contains the almost complete text of the ancient Syriac Gospels and dates from the late 4th or early 5th century, although it remained hidden for centuries covered by the text of another work called

, possibly written in 697. According to the monk, this text is the best witness, and one of only three in the world, of what the text of the Gospels was like in the second century.

The first attempt to recover the text, also known as the

because it was a manuscript whose original text was erased to overwrite it, was carried out by two renowned English scholars, the twins Agnes and Margaret Smith, in the nineties of the nineteenth century.

But until the Palimpsest Project that developed the library between 2012 and 2017, the previous codex could not be fully recovered using a multispectral image.

The same project revealed that another 160 manuscripts in the library are actually palimpsests, and it recovered 300 texts even older than extant.

“We have palimpsests from the Caucasus area, from Ethiopia and one with a script that was only used in England between the years 600 and 850. These were the three extremes of Christianity,” says the monk.

“That shows not only the importance of the text but also that Sinai was then the destination of the people there.

The pilgrims had to overcome tremendous difficulties to travel vast distances and reach the monastery, and the manuscripts that remain here are a testimony of that pilgrimage ”, he explains.