Ancient sites in Sinai lose visitors

CURRENT Foreign and Commonwealth Office advice, which counsels against all travel to North Sinai and all but essential travel to South Sinai, has led to fewer British visitors travelling to the peninsula’s religious sites. Archbishop Damianos of Sinai told The Tablet this week that St Catherine’s, the sixth-century monastery at the foothills of Mount Sinai in South Sinai, and one of the most revered in the Greek Orthodox Church, is still receiving visitors from around the world but numbers are down.

“We have about one-fifth of the visitors we used to have, and since the plane crash in North Sinai not many Russians are coming,” he said. He offered reassurance, however, that the region around St Catherine’s is “not dangerous and very normal”, especially since there are new security measures in the surrounding desert canyons. “North Sinai has bigger problems,” he reported. He hoped visitors would keep coming, partly to keep the monastery’s lay workers employed. It has 25 monks and a team of 135 workers.

The community has seen visitor numbers fall since Egypt’s revolution of 2011, and dwindle further since the Russian Airbus was bombed by terrorists over the Sinai desert with the loss of 224 lives on 31 October.