The historic library of the remote Saint Catherine’s Monastery, located in Egypt’s South Sinai governorate, has taken up a formidable conservation project to protect the most precious volumes of its large collection of ancient manuscripts. The initiative, one of the most ambitious of its kind, will place selected codices in specially designed boxes, the first 200 of which arrived at the library in June.
In total, the project involves creating stainless steel boxes for 2,000 manuscripts out of the 3,306 that the library holds. It's being funded by the Saint Catherine Foundation, a charity established in the United Kingdom in 1996 to support the conservation works at the monastery with a special focus on its library, as well as its associated organizations based in New York and Geneva.
