Book
From the Holy Mountain
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Dalrymple follows the late sixth-century journey of the monk John Moschos through the former Byzantine world, travelling from the monasteries of Greece and Turkey into Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Egypt. Ancient churches, monasteries and pilgrimage sites provide a route through the history of Eastern Christianity.
Along the way he records communities living under war, political pressure, demographic change and religious persecution. The book sets Moschos’s late-antique Christian landscape beside the modern Middle East, asking what remains of a culture that once linked Constantinople, the Levant and Egypt.