Jewish Desert and Orthodox Monasteries
Description:
To the east of the Mount of Olives begins the most beautiful Judean desert, in the Byzantine era turned into a real city - the City of Monasteries.
The beautiful Faran gorge, also known as Wadi el-Kelt (Arabic) or Nahal Prat (Hebrew), cuts through the Judean desert from Jerusalem to the Jordan Valley and ends just south of the town of Jericho.
The founder of the monastic movement, which gradually turned the desert into a huge city of monasteries, is Saint Chariton, who arrived in the Holy Land in the early 4th century AD.
Saint Dimitry of Rostov recounts the life of Saint Chariton the Confessor:
From that time Saint Chariton, adorned with the wounds of Christ, renounced the world and all that is in the world; taking up his cross, he walked the difficult path and became a living dead man, dead to the world, but alive to God.
The gold jars, the poisoned wine, the robber cave, the predatory beasts, the miraculously revealed spring in the hanging cave, the lion devoted to the elder and the terrible year 614 - all these are pieces of one story associated with the formation of the City of Monasteries in the early Christian period.
You will visit the first place of the birth of monastic desert life in the vicinity of Jerusalem - the Pharaoh's Lavra, and also go down on a donkey to the narrow gorge of the Prat stream, near the water of which the monastery of George Hozevita arose in the Byzantine period, along a steep mountain path climb to the monastery of Temptations on the Forty-Day Mountain and enjoy the most beautiful mosaics made by modern monks in the monastery of Gerasima, near the Jordan River. And, for the most hardy and inquisitive, by the end of the day there will be a hike to the Kalamon Lavra in the Date Valley.
What is the difference between a monastery and a monastery?
#Excursions to Israel
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