With the establishment of the Ligatus Research Unit the St. Catherine's website will move under the wider Ligatus website. The Ligatus website will include various projects and separate pages for bibliography and student work. We will start working on the new website on Friday the 16th of November and we hope that it will be ready before the 25th of November. During this time the St. Catherine's website will be offline for most of the time. We hope that the new website will worth the disruption.

Watch this space!

Thanasis

The deadline for application for the summer school in Volos has been extended to the 10th of August. Please see previous postings for relevant details or visit the summer school website.

The Project's website has been updated to the latest version of Drupal. However, because of this major upgrade there are a few compatibility issues still to be resolved. Although, I expect the website to run smoothly from now on, forgive me if it does not always respond as it should, at least in the first few days.

The symposium will take place in the Lecture Hall
at Camberwell College of Art, Peckham Road, on Wednesday, the 17th January 2007, from 2-5pm.

Prof. Nicholas Pickwoad will give a short introduction followed by a talk on: "All change at Saint Catherine's: renovating the library and creating the new digitising and conservation studios."

Andrew Honey will talk about "John Climacus in Los Angeles: Conservation of MS. Greek 418 for the 'Holy Image, Hallowed Ground: Icons from Sinai' exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum."

The slide digitisation is now completed. This was a project which lasted about 12 months and involved 4 persons. Georgia Gkouliavoudi, Isabelle Egan, Nikolaos Mantzouris and Heather Ravenberg have managed to complete the project before the expected date which was Christmas. Special credit should go to Heather for her huge contribution, especially over the past two months.

The resulting digital images are only available to the project members and the Monastery holds the copyright.

We would also like to thank the Headley Trust for generously funding this project.

We would like to congratulate George Boudalis on obtaining his new post at the museum of Byzantine Culture in Thessaloniki. There he will resume his earlier position in the conservation of manuscripts which he had held from 1997. In the meantime he joined the St. Catherine's Conservation Project in 2000.

Andrew Honey and Nicole Gilroy are to visit the monastery from 19 to 12 August to prepare a number of manuscripts for the exhibition "In the beginning: bibles before the year 1000", due to open on 21 October in the Sackler and Freer Gallery of Art in Washington DC. Most of the manuscripts come from the largely fragmentary New Finds collection, discovered in a ruined room in a tower in the monastery in 1975, which has allowed individual separated gatherings or bifolia to be sent to the exhibition, including a single bifolium of the Codex Siniaticus.

The project will be represented at three conferences this autumn. Nicholas Pickwoad will be giving a short paper with the title: "The Saint Catherine Monastery Library Project" at the 21st International Congress of Byzantine Studies in London on 24 August.

AHRC Postdoctoral Research Assistant

Ewelina Hebda has joined the St. Catherine's Project as the new project administrator replacing the post previously held by Octavia. From now on please contact Ewelina for any enquires. Ewelina comes to us with a lot of experience on multinational projects and with a talent in languages which I am sure we will all appreciate. Ewelina's personal page is here.

On 3rd of March, the fifteenth visit by the survey team (which lasted for two months instead of the usual one) finished the condition survey of the 3,307 bound manuscripts in the old library of the monastery. This completes the most detailed survey of its sort for a whole collection of this size, and it has involved the participation of 35 people from nine different countries.

Information about the project's Advisory Panel has recently been published on our website. Click here for more.

A team of six conservators started work in the library on Monday 9th January in what is to be the final session of the survey of the bound manuscripts. The team is led by Dr George Boudalis, who, with Marco Di Bella (third visit), Cédric Lelièvre (second visit) and Maria Argyrou, will be staying for 8 weeks. They will be working with Maria Kalligerou and Michael Gullick during January, and with Andrew Honey and Silvia Sotgiu in February. Prof Nicholas Pickwoad will join the team in the last week of February.

The project has been awarded a major AHRC grant in excess of £200,000 for work on the material generated by the conservation survey.

Updates about the digitisation of the project's database can be found in the link below. These include the Saint Catherines Scanning Utility, which can be downloaded for reviewing and other academic purposes. Any questions and comments can be sent to Athanasios Velios. Your feedback is greatly appreciated.