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Buy/gift a digital subscription Login to the Digital EditionVisitors who climb the long flight of rock-hewn stairs to the monastery of Mar Musa al-Habashi in the Syrian Desert, whatever their faith, will find a place of serenity, a welcome, and frescoes to dazzle them, writes Daniel Thorpe
Deir Mar Musa al-Habashi perches among the limestone hills halfway between Damascus and Homs. From the upstairs terrace of the monastery you can see the great wastes of the Syrian Desert, where the Hejaz railway once ran, connecting Istanbul to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Although now there is talk of rebuilding the railway, it is unlikely to disturb the monastery’s quiet isolation. The climb to Mar Musa is steep, with narrow, winding stairs built into the rock. As we slowly ascend, the monastery’s inhabitants peer down at us from the terraces. Before becoming a monastery this was a Roman fort, built in the 2nd century to guard the desert road from Damascus to Palmyra.
USEFUL LINKS
Deir Mar Musa al-Habeshi: The monastery’s website
The Royal Ontario Museum Blogs by Robert Mason on the frescoes and sacred landscape of Deir Mar Musa
Istanbul’s mystique has long captivated writers, but, as an exhibition reveals, not all care to visit. Maureen Freely gives us chapter and verse
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A show on food in art at the İşbank Museum of Painting and Sculpture is a veritable remembrance of times past
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