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.
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