Infighting among the monks of St. Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai has brought negotiations with the Egyptian government to a standstill, with Egypt’s highest court set to rule on the monastery’s future on Oct. 24. Egyptian officials have made clear that the Court of Cassation will not postpone its decision a fifth time. Greek officials have been told the court is leaning toward the first-instance ruling, which declared the monastery a monument. That outcome could lead to the monks being asked to leave.
The 14-member brotherhood, bitterly divided, must now make a historic decision about the monastery’s future. Archbishop Symeon of Sinai, who is recovering from illness, has been speaking only to his closest aides, and no one knows whether he intends to act or what he will do. His predecessor, Damianos, who stepped down, set off the rift last summer, when he responded to the Ismailia Court of Appeal ruling by locking the monastery’s gates and throwing out the monks who opposed him. He is now trying to drag the government into the fight, having written an open letter denouncing “modern-day Ephialtes” who, he says, care more about “business interests” than “national ideals.” In ancient Greek tradition, Ephialtes betrayed the defenders of Thermopylae to the Persians in 480 B.C., and his name remains a byword for treachery in Greece.
The letter also takes aim at the government. “The Greek prime minister must personally rise to the occasion and not arrogantly disregard the sacred ideals of the Greek people,” Damianos wrote. The foreign minister, he added, “looking for scapegoats, is turning against me today; tomorrow, if the Sinai Brotherhood continues to resist steadfastly and does not sign the agreement, will he turn against it, too?”
People familiar with the brotherhood say Damianos speaks for only a small part of it and is preparing to brand others as traitors if the court rules against the monastery. “But he handled everything in the Egyptian courts himself, and he bears full responsibility,” said one person with knowledge of the discussions.
NEWSLETTER TABLE TALK
Never miss a story.
Subscribe now.
The most important news & topics every week in your inbox.
Scattered Files in Arabic
The monastery’s legal fight with Egypt has an official history, written in the courtrooms, and an unofficial one that centers on Damianos and the way he handled the crisis. When the crisis erupted last year and Greek government officials were brought in to defuse it, they found no organized defense files. The briefs and legal arguments the monastery had submitted, according to people involved in the effort, were spread across several law firms, all in Arabic and none translated.
The Egyptian state’s first lawsuit, filed in 2015, alarmed the monastery, which rushed to sign leases on some of its farmland and asked the Syriza government then in power to intervene with Egypt on its behalf. Giannis Amanatidis, who was deputy foreign minister at the time, offered whatever help he could. Damianos, however, believed he could keep operating in a gray area and soon stopped seeking the Greek state’s assistance. The South Sinai Court of First Instance ruled against the monastery in May 2022, and Damianos took the case to the Ismailia Court of Appeal. While the appeal was pending, a new attempt was made at an out-of-court settlement, again with discreet support from Athens. The monastery, as the party to the case, conducted the negotiations. The Greek officials backing the effort had never seen the first-instance ruling and were relying on a short summary Damianos had given them. The talks failed, with Egypt insisting the monastery was a monument and the brotherhood citing the UNESCO decision.
The case dragged on until May 2025, when the appeals court unexpectedly issued its ruling. The decision improved on the first-instance judgment in many respects. Damianos sharply escalated his rhetoric, accusing Egypt of taking the monastery, and the case drew wide attention in Greece and abroad. The archbishop of Athens called it a “second Fall,” an allusion to the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453. The Ecumenical Patriarchate, the Istanbul-based seat of Orthodox Christianity’s spiritual leader, expressed its “surprise and disappointment” and urged the Egyptian government to find a fair solution.
Calls for His Removal
The Patriarchate of Jerusalem, which has spiritual ties to the autonomous monastery, called for Damianos to be removed after he failed to appear and account for his handling of the case. Some of the monks demanded that he be defrocked. Damianos called them “putschists” and accused the patriarchate of an unjust, orchestrated campaign against him, insisting he was the one saving the monastery.
Athens was again caught in the middle. Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis had taken a personal interest in Sinai and had been assured by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi, in Athens, that the negotiations would be given time and the appeals ruling held back. When the ruling was published anyway, at the urging of Egypt’s justice minister, the government was blindsided.
Foreign Minister George Gerapetritis asked to see the decision, but it existed only in Arabic. With the monks now at war among themselves, a Greek government team traveled to Cairo with no reliable briefing and no official documents. Egypt’s delegation drew fewer officials from its Foreign Ministry than from the more hardline Justice Ministry, who pressed the question of national sovereignty and cited European laws on monuments, armed with legal arguments in English. The Egyptians knew the case inside out; the Greeks were working from a one-page summary Damianos had given them. Gerapetritis, on the back foot, went on the attack. He told his hosts they could not invoke the friendship between the two countries when the ruling had been issued without warning, in the middle of talks on a settlement, and had not even been shared with him.
The Egyptians then handed over the ruling. Once it was translated, Greek officials were stunned by the position Damianos had taken in court. The case has since moved to the Court of Cassation. Damianos has resigned, and Symeon, his successor, has launched a new effort to reach a deal. Damianos, for his part, claims that Greek diplomacy has failed and is demanding that any agreement be submitted to the Greek people for their approval.
Some seem to be working behind the scenes to bring Damianos back to Sinai, but Cairo will not accept his return, nor does it have any intention of giving him the agreement it denied him for years. Amid this small civil war, the monastery’s 1,500-year history hangs in the balance.