Mar Saba, the Living Monastery

The Great Lavra founded by Sabbas the Sanctified in the Kidron gorge — the Holy Lavra of St Sabbas the Sanctified, known in Arabic as Mar Saba — has been inhabited by monks from the late fifth century to the present day, making it one of the oldest continuously or near-continuously occupied monasteries on earth. This file traces its long life under shifting empires: the Sasanian sack of 614 and the Arab conquest, the great age of Sabaite theology and hymnography under Muslim rule (above all St John of Damascus, who lived and was buried there), the centuries of Crusader, Ottoman, and Russian involvement, the recurrent earthquakes and rebuildings, and the strict regime under which the lavra lives today as a house of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Desert Father; founder of the Great Lavra)

A Monastery That Never Emptied

The Great Lavra of Sabbas, set in the cliffs of the Kidron ravine (the Wadi en-Nar) some kilometres southeast of Jerusalem and Bethlehem, was founded in 483 and organized as a community across the following decade (Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Sabas 16–18; trans. Price 1991; see The Founding of Mar Saba (483)). What distinguishes it from almost every other monastery of the late-antique Christian East is not its founding but its survival: where the great houses of the Judean desert — the lavra of Euthymius, the coenobium of Theoctistus, the New Lavra, the lavra of Chariton — declined, were destroyed, or vanished altogether in the centuries after the Arab conquest, Mar Saba endured, and monks have lived in it through every subsequent period of Palestinian history (Binns 1994, 1–13, 247–251; Patrich 1995, ch. 3). It is on this ground that the monastery is regularly described as among the oldest continuously, or very nearly continuously, inhabited monasteries in the world.

That claim must be made with care. The monastery’s occupation was not unbroken in the sense of a single uninterrupted census; it suffered sack, depopulation, and at least temporary near-abandonment at several points, and its numbers fell from the many hundreds of the Byzantine golden age to a handful in some later centuries (Patrich 1995, ch. 3; Chitty 1966, 168–178). [Disputed: the popular formula "continuously inhabited since 483" is broadly defensible but should be qualified — the lavra suffered the Persian sack of 614, Bedouin raids, plague, earthquake, and periods of severe depopulation, so that "continuously or near-continuously inhabited" is the more exact description; the unqualified superlative "oldest continuously inhabited monastery in the world" is a contested honorific also claimed for St Catherine's at Sinai and for several other ancient houses, and is not securely adjudicable.] What is not in dispute is the extraordinary fact of persistence: the lavra has kept the cycle of prayer in the same gorge, in buildings descended by repair and rebuilding from Sabbas’s own, for some fifteen centuries.

The Persian Sack of 614

The first catastrophe to fall on the Sabaite community came with the Sasanian Persian invasion of Roman Palestine under Khosrow II. In 614 the Persian army, allied with elements hostile to the Christians of the region, took Jerusalem after a siege, carried off the relic of the True Cross to Ctesiphon, and devastated the churches and monasteries of the province; the Judean desert houses, exposed and undefended, were among the targets (Chitty 1966, 150–157; Binns 1994, 247–248). The fall of Jerusalem in 614 and the slaughter that accompanied it are reported in the contemporary and near-contemporary sources, above all in the lament attributed to Strategius (Antiochus Strategos) of Mar Saba, On the Capture of Jerusalem, which survives in Georgian and Arabic and gives a monk’s-eye account of the destruction (Chitty 1966, 150–157, who draws on Strategius; the work is the principal narrative witness to the sack from within the Palestinian monastic world).

To this period belongs the memory of the monks of Mar Saba slain by the invaders — a body of Sabaite martyrs commemorated in the tradition as having been put to death when the lavra was overrun in the wake of the 614 invasion. The monastery’s own martyrology and later synaxaria preserve the memory of fathers of the lavra killed by raiders in this era; the number and circumstances given in later accounts vary, and the episode is held in the tradition as a martyrdom of the desert community rather than established in precise historical detail (Chitty 1966, 150–157). [Disputed: a commemoration of "the holy fathers slain at the Lavra of St Sabbas" is kept in the tradition and is associated by some accounts with the Persian invasion of 614 and by others with a later Saracen/Bedouin massacre of the eighth or ninth century; the sources do not agree on the date, the number of the slain (figures such as forty-four are given in some later notices), or whether one event or several lie behind the commemoration — the martyrdom is therefore reported here as the tradition attests it, not fixed to a single dated event (METHODOLOGY §3.5).] Whatever its precise circumstances, the lavra was not extinguished: the community recovered, and the seventh century would prove to be the threshold of its greatest cultural age.

The Arab Conquest and the Beginning of Life under Islam

The Roman recovery of Palestine under Heraclius after 628 was brief. Within a decade the armies of the nascent Islamic caliphate had taken the province, and Jerusalem passed under Muslim rule with its surrender, by tradition to the caliph ʿUmar, in 638 (Griffith 2008, 11–13, 23–35, on the Arab conquest and the new dispensation for the Christians of the Levant). The conquest did not destroy the monastery. Under the early caliphate the Christian populations of Syria and Palestine — the great majority of the inhabitants in the first generations — continued their ecclesial life as a tolerated, tax-paying dhimmi community, and the Judean monasteries, Mar Saba foremost among them, persisted within the new order (Griffith 2008, 11–43; Binns 1994, 247–251).

The consequence for the Sabaite lavra was decisive and, in cultural terms, paradoxically fruitful. Cut off from Constantinople and from the protection and patronage of the Christian Roman emperor, the monastery became one of the principal centres in which the Greek-Christian and, increasingly, the Arabic-Christian intellectual tradition of the Melkite (“imperial,” i.e. Chalcedonian) Church was sustained and developed under Muslim rule (Griffith 2008, 137–155). It is in the monasteries of the Judean desert, and at Mar Saba above all, that the Chalcedonian Christians of the caliphate did their theology, copied their books, and began the long work of translating their tradition into Arabic, the new common tongue of the region (Griffith 2008, 48–53, 137–155). The lavra’s survival under Islam is thus not merely a fact of endurance but the precondition of its golden age.

The Sabaite Golden Age: St John of Damascus

The supreme figure of that golden age, and the man who has made Mar Saba a name in the history of Christian thought, is St John of Damascus (c. 675/676 – c. 749). Born into a prominent Christian family of Damascus that served in the financial administration of the Umayyad caliphate, John abandoned his place at the caliphal court, came to the Judean desert, and became a monk of the Great Lavra of Sabbas, where he was ordained priest and spent the decades of his maturity writing (see St John of Damascus). It was at Mar Saba, in the relative shelter the monastery’s situation under Muslim rule afforded from the reach of the iconoclast emperors of Constantinople, that John composed the three Treatises Against Those Who Calumniate the Holy Images in defence of the icons, the great theological summa of the Fount of Knowledge (with its Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith), and a vast body of liturgical poetry, including the Paschal canon (Griffith 2008, 40–43; Louth, St John Damascene, Oxford 2002, on John’s life and Sabaite context).

John is traditionally held to have lived out his life and died at the lavra around 749, and his tomb is shown at Mar Saba to this day; his relics rested there until, in a later century, they were translated. The association of the foremost systematizer of Greek patristic theology with the Sabaite lavra is the central fact of the monastery’s cultural history: the dogmatic and hymnographic legacy of the Eastern Church passed, at a critical juncture, through this desert house (Louth 2002; Griffith 2008, 40–43). The deep institutional connection runs further still, for the liturgical typikon by which Mar Saba ordered its worship — the Sabaite, or Jerusalem, typikon — became, through later Byzantine adoption, the foundation of the Orthodox liturgical day across the whole Eastern Church (see The Sabaite Liturgical Legacy and The Jerusalem Typikon).

Theodore Abū Qurrah and the Turn to Arabic

The Sabaite cultural milieu did not end with John of Damascus. The monastery and its circle stand at the head of the first great age of Arabic Christian theology — the moment at which the Melkite Church of the caliphate began to write its theology not only in Greek but in Arabic, the language it now shared with its Muslim neighbours and rulers (Griffith 2008, 48–53, 137–155). The figure most often associated with this turn, and connected in the tradition with the Sabaite milieu, is Theodore Abū Qurrah (c. 750 – c. 825), the Melkite theologian and later bishop of Harran, who wrote treatises in both Greek and Arabic defending the Christian faith — including the veneration of icons — in dialogue and debate with Muslims and others (Griffith 2008, 60–63, 137–155). The scholarly picture of his precise relation to the monastery has been refined: where an older tradition made Abū Qurrah straightforwardly a monk of Mar Saba, modern study is more cautious about the biographical details. [Disputed: Theodore Abū Qurrah is traditionally described as a monk of Mar Saba, and he certainly belonged to the Melkite Sabaite-Jerusalemite theological world; but the direct evidence for his personal residence at the lavra is thin, and Sidney Griffith and others have questioned the older assumption that he was formed there as a monk — his connection to the monastery is therefore best stated as association with the Sabaite milieu rather than as documented membership of the community (Griffith 2008, 60–63, 137–155).]

Whatever Abū Qurrah’s personal biography, the larger point is secure: in the eighth and ninth centuries the Judean monasteries, with Mar Saba prominent among them, were the workshops in which Chalcedonian Christianity under Islam produced its theology and translated its inheritance — Scripture, the Fathers, the lives of the saints, the liturgical books — from Greek and Syriac into Arabic, so that the faith could be held and defended in the language of the caliphate (Griffith 2008, 137–155). The lavra was thus, across these centuries, simultaneously a centre of Greek learning, a nursery of Arabic Christian letters, and a major site of manuscript production.

A Centre of Manuscript Production

The literary fertility of the Sabaite community left a material deposit: books. Mar Saba and the related Judean houses were significant scriptoria, and a substantial body of Greek, Arabic (Christian Arabic, sometimes called Melkite Arabic), Georgian, and Syriac manuscripts was copied at or for the monastery across the medieval centuries (Griffith 2008, 48–53, 137–155). Many of the oldest dated Christian Arabic manuscripts are products of, or are connected to, this Palestinian monastic milieu, and the monastery’s library — repeatedly depleted, dispersed, and partly removed in later centuries — is one of the important sources for the textual history of the Eastern Church under Islam (Griffith 2008, 137–155). In the modern period a large part of the surviving Sabaite manuscript collection was transferred for safekeeping; the bulk of the Greek manuscripts of Mar Saba is now held in the library of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem, and Sabaite codices are scattered among the great European and Near Eastern collections. [Disputed: the dispersal and present location of the Mar Saba manuscripts are complex and only partly documented in any single source; the broad fact — that the bulk of the monastery's old Greek manuscripts was removed to Jerusalem and that other Sabaite codices reached European libraries — is well established, but precise inventories vary, and individual famous attributions (for example, the much-discussed "Mar Saba" provenance of certain disputed manuscripts) should be checked against specialist catalogues rather than asserted here.]

Crusader and Later Medieval Centuries

When the armies of the First Crusade took Jerusalem in 1099 and established the Latin Kingdom, Mar Saba came within reach of Western Christendom for the first time since the Arab conquest. The monastery, an Orthodox house, continued under its own Greek discipline through the Crusader period, and it figures in the pilgrim literature of the twelfth century as one of the great holy places of the desert that Western pilgrims sought to visit (Patrich 1995, ch. 3; Chitty 1966, 168–178). It was in this medieval context — most likely during the Crusader era, when the relations and the routes between Palestine and Latin Europe were open — that the relics of St Sabbas himself were carried from the lavra to the West and came to rest at Venice, where they remained until the twentieth century (the translation and the 1965 return are treated in The Relics).

The later medieval and early Ottoman centuries were hard ones for the lavra. The fall of the Crusader kingdom, the return of the region to Muslim rule under the Ayyubids and Mamluks, the depredations of Bedouin raiders to whom the isolated monastery was perpetually exposed, and the general contraction of Christian life in Palestine all pressed on the community, whose numbers fell far below those of the Byzantine age (Chitty 1966, 168–178; Patrich 1995, ch. 3). The monastery survived as a small and often beleaguered community, sustained by its own discipline, by the patronage of the Patriarchate of Jerusalem, and increasingly by the alms of Orthodox benefactors abroad.

Ottoman Centuries, Earthquakes, and Russian Support

Under Ottoman rule (from the early sixteenth century) Mar Saba persisted as a dependency within the framework of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem, which administered the Orthodox holy places and monasteries of the Holy Land under the Ottoman millet system. The monastery’s physical fabric, clinging to the cliffs of an earthquake-prone region, suffered repeated damage from seismic events and required successive rebuildings; the buildings visible today are largely the product of repairs and reconstructions of the Ottoman centuries, raised on the descended foundations of the Byzantine lavra (Patrich 1995, ch. 3). [Disputed: the monastery's standing fabric reflects multiple phases of earthquake damage and rebuilding across the medieval and Ottoman periods; particular structures (the main katholikon of the Annunciation, the cells, the towers, the perimeter wall) are commonly dated to specific reconstructions, but the precise dates and sponsors of individual rebuildings are not uniformly fixed in the accessible literature and should be taken from the archaeological surveys rather than from devotional accounts.]

The most consequential external patron of the later centuries was the Orthodox world beyond the Ottoman Empire, and above all Russia. From the eighteenth and especially the nineteenth century, Russian imperial and ecclesiastical patronage — channelled through the Patriarchate of Jerusalem and, later, through institutions such as the Imperial Orthodox Palestine Society — supported the Orthodox holy places of Palestine, Mar Saba among them, with funds, pilgrims, and prestige (Patrich 1995, ch. 3; Chitty 1966, 168–178). The Russian connection is part of the wider pattern by which the survival of the ancient Orthodox monasteries of the Holy Land under non-Christian rule depended on the support of the broader Orthodox commonwealth.

The Monastery Today

Mar Saba remains today an active monastery of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem, inhabited by a small community of monks who keep a regime of notable strictness. The lavra preserves, more fully than almost any other living house, the marks of its ancient character. It keeps the long Sabaite cycle of services in the rhythm laid down by its own typikon; the daily round of prayer remains the centre of the life (see Daily Cycle and Monasticism). By long-standing observance the monastery uses no electricity, lighting its churches and cells by oil lamp and candle and keeping the old austerity of the desert (Patrich 1995, ch. 3, on the monastery’s surviving traditional regime).

The most famous of the lavra’s rules, and the one most often remarked by visitors, is the exclusion of women from the main enclosure. By a discipline of great antiquity — the rule of abaton, the “untrodden” enclosure observed at Mar Saba as at Mount Athos — women are not admitted within the walls of the monastery; the tradition holds that this was the practice of the lavra from early times. A separate structure, the so-called Women’s Tower standing outside the enclosure, allows women pilgrims to approach, to lodge, and to venerate from without (Patrich 1995, ch. 3). [Disputed: the exclusion of women from the inner enclosure of Mar Saba is firmly established as the monastery's living rule and is associated in tradition with St Sabbas himself; the attribution of the rule, and of the Women's Tower outside the walls, to Sabbas's own lifetime is part of the monastic tradition rather than a securely dated historical datum, and is reported here as the tradition attests it (METHODOLOGY §3.5).]

Within its walls the monastery shows the tomb of St John of Damascus and the relics of St Sabbas, returned in 1965 (see The Relics), and it continues to receive Orthodox pilgrims who make the descent into the Kidron gorge to the cliff-hung lavra. Fifteen centuries after Sabbas first kept vigil in the ravine and saw, as Cyril of Scythopolis tells it, the pillar of fire that revealed the God-built cave, the prayer of the Great Lavra has never wholly ceased in that place — a continuity that is itself, in the judgment of the Orthodox tradition and of the historians of the Christian East alike, among the most remarkable in the history of Christian monasticism (Binns 1994, 247–251; Patrich 1995, ch. 3; Chitty 1966).

References

Cyril of Scythopolis. Life of Sabas, in The Lives of the Monks of Palestine. Trans. R. M. Price, with introduction and notes by John Binns. Cistercian Studies 114. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1991. (Primary source for the founding of the lavra in 483 and the early community whose later history is followed here.)
Binns, John. Ascetics and Ambassadors of Christ: The Monasteries of Palestine 314–631. Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. (The Judean desert monasteries, their survival and decline; the Persian invasion of 614 and the fate of the desert houses; the singular persistence of Mar Saba.)
Patrich, Joseph. Sabas, Leader of Palestinian Monasticism: A Comparative Study in Eastern Monasticism, Fourth to Seventh Centuries. Dumbarton Oaks Studies 32. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1995. (The archaeology, topography, and continuing life of the Great Lavra; its buildings, rebuildings, regime, and the rule of the enclosure.)
Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City: An Introduction to the Study of Egyptian and Palestinian Monasticism under the Christian Empire. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (Narrative history of the Judean desert; the Persian sack of 614 and Strategius’s lament; the later fortunes of the monasteries under Islam.)
Griffith, Sidney H. The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque: Christians and Muslims in the World of Islam. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. (Christian life under early Islam; the Melkite monasteries of Palestine as centres of Greek and Arabic Christian theology and translation; John of Damascus and Theodore Abū Qurrah in the Sabaite milieu; manuscript production.)
Louth, Andrew. St John Damascene: Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology. Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. (The life of John of Damascus, his monastic profession at Mar Saba, and his theological and hymnographic work in the Sabaite community.)