The Great Pilgrimage City

Over the reputed tomb of St. Menas in the Mareotis (Mariout) desert, roughly 45 km southwest of Alexandria, at the place the Arabs called Abu Mena (Karm Abū Mīna), there grew in late antiquity one of the largest and best-documented pilgrimage complexes of the early Christian world: a tomb-church (Gruftkirche) over the crypt, a monumental Great Basilica (the Martyr-Church) traditionally associated with the emperor Arcadius and built under Zeno in the late fifth century, a baptistery, healing baths fed by sacred springs, hostels (xenodochia) for the throngs of pilgrims, and colonnaded streets — a city built around a saint. This file describes that complex as the excavations of Carl Maria Kaufmann (Frankfurt expedition, 1905–1907) and the long campaigns of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut under Peter Grossmann have recovered it: its rise to a fifth- to seventh-century peak, its decline after the Persian and Arab conquests, and its modern status as a UNESCO World Heritage Site (1979) placed on the List of World Heritage in Danger (2001).

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox / Coptic (Great Martyr; Wonderworker)

A City Built Around a Tomb

The most important fact about Abu Mena is that it is a city that exists for no reason but a grave. There is no harbour here, no river, no road junction, no agricultural wealth, no strategic position — only a stretch of arid limestone shelf in the Mareotis desert, some 45 km southwest of Alexandria, where a martyr named Menas was believed to be buried (Grossmann, Abû Mînâ I, 1989; Grossmann, “Abu Mina,” in Atiya, ed., Coptic Encyclopedia, 1991). Everything excavated there — the churches, the baptistery, the baths, the hostels, the workshops, the colonnaded streets, the cisterns and the water-system that made habitation possible in a waterless place — was built to receive, house, feed, baptize, heal, and bless the pilgrims who came to the tomb. The settlement is, in the strict sense, a pilgrimage-city: a town whose entire economy and form were generated by a cult (Kaufmann, Die Menasstadt, 1910; Grossmann, Abû Mînâ I, 1989; on the wider phenomenon, Frankfurter, ed., Pilgrimage and Holy Space in Late Antique Egypt, 1998).

This is what makes Abu Mena the firm ground of the whole Menas case. The Passio is a legendary text of uncertain date (see The Passio); the city is in the ground, excavated, planned, and dated, and it testifies — independently of any narrative — that by late antiquity an enormous cult had grown over the tomb of Menas in the Mareotis (see The Historical Core). The scale of the complex measures the depth of the devotion. It does not, of itself, confirm a single line of the vita; what it establishes, beyond reasonable doubt, is the cult.

The Tomb-Church (Gruftkirche)

At the heart of the site, and at the heart of its history, is the crypt — the Gruft — believed to contain the relics of the saint, and the small church first built over it, the Gruftkirche or tomb-church. This is the nucleus from which everything else expanded. Peter Grossmann devoted the first volume of the definitive DAI publication, Abû Mînâ I: Die Gruftkirche und die Gruft (1989), precisely to this structure and the crypt beneath it, because the building sequence of the whole site can be read outward from this point: a modest martyr’s shrine, enlarged and rebuilt in stages as the cult grew, until it stood at the eastern end of a vast church-complex (Grossmann, Abû Mînâ I, 1989).

The crypt was reached by descending stairs, so that the pilgrim went down to the saint — the architecture of approach to a holy grave, common to the great martyr-shrines of the period, in which the relic lies below and the worshipper draws near by descent (Grossmann, Abû Mînâ I, 1989). It was at and around this tomb that the characteristic practices of the shrine were enacted: prayer at the grave, the collection of the eulogia — the “blessing” of oil from the lamps and water from the holy springs — to be carried away in the stamped terracotta flasks, and, the Miracles attest, the incubation by which the sick slept at the shrine in hope of a healing dream or cure (see The Menas Flasks; Incubation and Healing).

The Great Basilica (the Martyr-Church)

As the cult grew the tomb-church proved far too small for the crowds, and beside and around it there rose the monumental structure that dominates the plan of Abu Mena: the Great Basilica, the Martyr-Church, one of the largest churches of late-antique Egypt. The complex came to consist of an axial sequence — the tomb-church over the crypt at the east, a great transept basilica, and, joined to it, a large pilgrimage church — together forming an immense ecclesiastical core, monumentalized in the late fourth and (above all) the fifth century as the pilgrimage reached its height (Grossmann, Abû Mînâ I, 1989; Grossmann, “Abu Mina,” in Atiya, ed., Coptic Encyclopedia, 1991; Kaufmann, Die Menasstadt, 1910).

The imperial patronage of this monumental phase is reported by tradition but is not securely fixed, and it should be stated as a contested attribution rather than a fact. [Disputed: tradition associates the monumental enlargement of the shrine with the emperor **Arcadius** (r. 395–408), and the major fifth-century building campaign is dated by the excavators to the reign of **Zeno** (r. 474–491); the precise imperial patron and date of the Great Basilica's monumental phase are debated among the archaeologists, who reconstruct the sequence from the building-archaeology rather than from a secure dedicatory record (Grossmann, *Abû Mînâ I*, 1989; Grossmann, "Abu Mina," in Atiya, ed., *Coptic Encyclopedia*, 1991; Kaufmann, *Die Menasstadt*, 1910)]. What is not in doubt is that, by the late fifth century, Abu Mena possessed a church-complex of imperial scale — a monument that only sustained, large-scale patronage could have raised in the desert, and a measure of how important the shrine had become to the Christian Mediterranean.

The Baptistery

West of the church-complex stood a large baptistery, one of the most important structures on the site, with a substantial font for the baptism of the many who came to be initiated at the shrine of the great wonderworker (Grossmann, Abû Mînâ I, 1989; Kaufmann, Die Menasstadt, 1910). A baptistery on this scale is itself evidence of the volume of pilgrimage: it was built to handle numbers, and its prominence in the plan shows that Abu Mena was not only a place of healing and blessing but a place of Christian initiation, where the catechumen entered the Church at the tomb of a martyr. The font and its surrounding rooms were rebuilt and elaborated over the life of the shrine, tracking the same growth visible in the churches (Grossmann, Abû Mînâ I, 1989).

The Baths and the Sacred Springs

Among the most distinctive features of Abu Mena are its baths and the water that fed them. The site sat over a source of water — the holy springs whose water was, with the lamp-oil, the substance of the eulogia carried off in the ampullae — and around this water the pilgrimage built bath-complexes where the sick washed in hope of healing (Kaufmann, Die Menasstadt, 1910; Grossmann, Abû Mînâ I, 1989). The combination is characteristic of the late-antique healing shrine: the saint as physician, the holy water as the medium of cure, and a built environment of pools and baths in which the therapeutic ritual was performed. The Miracles of St Menas report a stream of healings at the shrine, and the baths are the physical apparatus of that reported healing-cult (see Incubation and Healing; on the miracle-texts, The Miracle Collections).

The water that made Abu Mena possible is also, in the cruellest of ironies, what now threatens it: the same hydrology that once supplied the springs has, under modern conditions, turned against the ruins (see below).

The Hostels and the City

A pilgrimage of this magnitude required lodging, and Abu Mena had it in quantity: hostels — xenodochia, pilgrim-guest-houses — built to shelter the throngs who travelled to the saint, ranged along the streets of the settlement (Grossmann, Abû Mînâ I, 1989; Kaufmann, Die Menasstadt, 1910; on the institution, Frankfurter, ed., Pilgrimage and Holy Space, 1998). Around the religious core spread the apparatus of a working town: colonnaded streets linking the churches to the hostels and the commercial quarters, shops and workshops — including the potteries that mass-produced the famous Menas flasks — dwellings, courtyards, cisterns, and the elaborate water-management system without which no settlement could survive on that desert shelf (Kaufmann, Die Menasstadt, 1910; Grossmann, Abû Mînâ I, 1989). The result was a true city, with a plan generated by the movement of pilgrims from arrival, to lodging, to the baths, to the baptistery, to the tomb, and to the workshops where they bought the blessing to carry home. To walk the excavated streets is to walk the choreography of an ancient pilgrimage.

The Excavation History

The recovery of Abu Mena is itself a notable chapter in the history of Christian archaeology. The site was excavated by Carl Maria Kaufmann with the Frankfurt expedition in 1905–1907, and Kaufmann published its findings in his foundational report, Die Menasstadt und das Nationalheiligtum der altchristlichen Aegypter (Leipzig: Hiersemann, 1910) — the work that first revealed the pilgrimage-city to scholarship and that remains the starting-point for all later study, even where its conclusions have been revised (Kaufmann, Die Menasstadt, 1910). Kaufmann’s title — calling Abu Mena the “national sanctuary of the early Christian Egyptians” — captures the importance he rightly saw in the site.

The modern, systematic investigation of Abu Mena has been the work of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut (DAI), whose long campaigns from the 1960s onward were directed for many years by Peter Grossmann, the leading authority on the architecture of the site (Grossmann, Abû Mînâ I, 1989, and numerous DAI preliminary reports; Grossmann, “Abu Mina,” in Atiya, ed., Coptic Encyclopedia, 1991). It is the DAI work that has produced the detailed building-archaeology — the phasing of the churches, the sequence of the tomb-church and crypt, the plan of the baptistery, baths, and hostels — on which the modern understanding of the complex rests, and Grossmann’s Abû Mînâ I (1989) is the definitive publication of its sacred nucleus. The reconstruction of the imperial-patronage sequence, and the cautious dating of the monumental phase to the later fifth century, are products of this same archaeological work rather than of any secure ancient dedication (Grossmann, Abû Mînâ I, 1989; see the [Disputed] note above; and Archaeology versus Passio).

Peak and Decline

Abu Mena reached its height as a pilgrimage-city in the fifth to seventh centuries, the period of its monumental churches, its baths and hostels, its flask-industry, and its Mediterranean-wide fame (Grossmann, “Abu Mina,” in Atiya, ed., Coptic Encyclopedia, 1991; Kaufmann, Die Menasstadt, 1910). Its decline followed the political catastrophes that overtook Byzantine Egypt in the seventh century. The Persian (Sasanian) conquest of Egypt, c. 619, and then the Arab conquest, completed c. 642, broke the framework of imperial patronage and Mediterranean pilgrimage on which a shrine of this scale depended (Grossmann, “Abu Mina,” in Atiya, ed., Coptic Encyclopedia, 1991). The cult did not vanish — Menas remained a great saint of the Copts, and activity continued at the site for a time under early Islamic rule — but the great age of the pilgrimage-city was over, and the complex suffered later damage and progressive ruin, until it lay buried and largely forgotten before the modern excavations recovered it (Grossmann, “Abu Mina,” in Atiya, ed., Coptic Encyclopedia, 1991; Kaufmann, Die Menasstadt, 1910). The modern Coptic revival of the cult, with the founding of the nearby Monastery of St Mina (Deir Mar Mina) in the 1950s, belongs to a later chapter and is treated in Section 07 (see Menas in Coptic Christianity).

World Heritage and the Modern Danger

The ruins of Abu Mena were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1979, recognized as an outstanding witness to early Christian pilgrimage and to the architecture of a late-antique sacred city (UNESCO World Heritage Centre, Abu Mena). In 2001 the property was placed on the List of World Heritage in Danger — the very water that once made the shrine has become its enemy: the expansion of agricultural land reclamation around the site raised the local water-table sharply, and the rising groundwater has undermined and collapsed structures, threatening the fragile remains with destruction (UNESCO World Heritage Centre, Abu Mena). The endangerment is a direct, modern, hydrological threat to one of the greatest physical monuments of the early cult of the martyrs, and efforts to lower the groundwater and stabilize the ruins have been the focus of the site’s conservation since.

That a desert shrine, built over a tomb where (the legend says) a camel would carry the saint’s body no further, should be threatened in our own day by an excess of water in the desert is a final irony of Abu Mena’s long history — and a reminder that the firmest evidence in the Menas dossier, the city in the ground, is itself perishable and in need of protection.

See Also

References

  • Kaufmann, Carl Maria. Die Menasstadt und das Nationalheiligtum der altchristlichen Aegypter. Leipzig: Hiersemann, 1910. (The foundational excavation report of the Frankfurt expedition, 1905–1907: the shrine complex, the churches, the baptistery, the baths and springs, the hostels, the streets, and the ampullae.)
  • Grossmann, Peter. Abû Mînâ I: Die Gruftkirche und die Gruft. Mainz: von Zabern, 1989; and numerous DAI excavation reports. (The definitive modern archaeology of the tomb-church and crypt, and the building-phasing of the wider site; the cautious dating of the monumental phase.)
  • Grossmann, Peter. “Abu Mina.” In The Coptic Encyclopedia, ed. Aziz S. Atiya, 8 vols. New York: Macmillan, 1991. (The site’s phases, the imperial-patronage question, the fifth- to seventh-century peak, and the decline after the seventh-century conquests.)
  • Frankfurter, David, ed. Pilgrimage and Holy Space in Late Antique Egypt. Leiden: Brill, 1998. (The pilgrimage context, the eulogia and ampullae, and the institutions of the Egyptian saints’ shrines.)
  • Papaconstantinou, Arietta. Le culte des saints en Égypte des Byzantins aux Abbassides. Paris: CNRS, 2001. (The documented cult of Menas in late-antique and early-Islamic Egypt.)
  • UNESCO World Heritage Centre. Abu Mena. (World Heritage inscription, 1979; placement on the List of World Heritage in Danger, 2001, for rising groundwater from agricultural land reclamation.)