Abu Mena

The ruins of Abu Mena, the City of St Menas, the greatest Christian place of pilgrimage in the East during the early medieval period and the largest Coptic town so far known, lies in the Mareotic Desert some 50mi/80km southwest of Alexandria, half way to the Wadi Natrun. This extensive site, known to the bedouin as Karm Abu Mina, the "Vineyard of St Menas", aroused wide international interest when it was discovered in 1905 by a German archeologist, Carl Maria Kaufmann, and since then has been extensively excavated and studied, with long interruptions, particularly during the two world wars. Most of the finds from the site are displayed in the Coptic Museum in Cairo. History

The story of St Manas, a very popular Egyptian Saint (feast day November 11 ) and the patron of merchants, is the subject of numerous legends and myths. Of Egyptian or Libyan origin, he was a Roman legionary in the time of Diocletian who was converted to the Christian faith and suffered a martyr's death in Phrygia in A.D. 296. Tradition asserts that when his comrades were carrying his body home the camels suddenly stopped on the edge of the Libyan Desert and could not be persuaded to move from the spot. Seeing this as a sign from Heaven, the soldiers buried Menas at the place indicated whereupon 90 springs of water gushed out of the ground and gave rise to a variety of miracles. Then pilgrims from all over the Near East began to flock to the site seeking a cure for their ailments, taking some of the water home with them in small pottery bottles made on the spot, usually decorated with a representation of St Menas between two crouching camels.

It is certain at any rate that on the site of the present burial church there was a grave of the period in question, within a cemetery bordering a settlement of some kind. In the course of time this tomb was steadily enlarged at the expense of surrounding burials, and towards the end of the fourth century a small oratory was built over it. In the first half of the fifth century this gave place to a basilica, which in turn was replaced at the beginning of the sixth century by the Basilica of the Crypt, the present burial church. At about the same time the Great Basilica was built on to its eastern end, also on the site of an earlier structure. After the destruction of the holy place by fire, presumably as a result of the spread of Islam from the seventh century onwards, the Patriarch Joseph (830-849) built, shortly before 850, a new five aisled basilica in which much of the older church was incorporated.

Round this much venerated shrine there grew up a magnificent city, which according to contemporary accounts was built entirely of marble and was equipped with all the attributes of an established place of pilgrimage, rather in the manner of present-day Lourdes. The heyday of the City of St Menaswas in the fifth and sixth centuries; but from the seventh century onwards it was subject to repeated raids by bedouin converted to Islam, and about 900 it was plundered and devastated by the Abbasids. It was not finally abandoned by its last surviving inhabitants, however, until the 13th century. Thereafter the remains were buried under the sand of the advancing desert.

The Site

Visitors are shown round the site by a monk from the nearby Monastery of St Menas. The central feature of the ancient city, the streets and houses of which can be clearly identified from the excavated remains, is the complex consisting of the Basilica the Crypt built over the Saint's grave, the Great Basilica adjoining its east end and the Baptistery at its west end.