As such, the library of the monastery of St. Catherine was organized only in 1734 by Archbishop Nikephoros of Sinai in a book depository near the chapel of John the Baptist. He “arranged all the manuscripts in it in alphabetical order, and selected the best of them and transferred them to his cell.”3 Currently, the library stores about 4,500 manuscripts in different languages, approximately 15,000 editions.4
Many European scientists worked in Sinai and took away manuscripts of interest to them. Currently, many manuscripts from this repository and their fragments are scattered among the libraries of cities in different countries: Leipzig, Venice, London, Oxford, Vienna, etc.5 They are also located in St. Petersburg. V. N. Beneshevich believed that in general “until the second half of the 19th century, the history of the library of the Sinai Monastery was, predominantly, the history of its theft.”6
The Russian National Library owes many researchers the appearance in its collections of materials originating from the Sinai Monastery. Among them are Slavic manuscripts (including Glagolitic), Syriac, Arabic, but mainly Greek. Some were brought by Archimandrite Porfiry (Uspensky) (1845 and 1850) and Archimandrite Antonin (Kapustin) (1870), others by Konstantin Tischendorf, a professor at the University of Leipzig, who was in Sinai three times: in 1844, in 1858, and in 1859 “at the expense of the Russian government” - and then transferred his collection of Greek manuscripts to Russia. Among the Russian scientists who came to the Sinai Monastery in the 19th and early 20th centuries. and from whom the manuscripts came to the St. Petersburg Imperial Public Library were N. P. Kondakov (1881), A. A. Dmitrievsky (1888), V. N. Beneshevich (1907, 1908 and 1911) and a number of other persons.7 Sinai manuscripts were also purchased from A.I. Papadopoulo-Keramevs and V. Yagich.
Among them, A. A. Dmitrievsky singles out Bishop Porfiry Uspensky, Archimandrite Antonin, academicians N. P. Kondakov and N. Ya. Marr, Professor A. A. Tsagarelli, V. N. Beneshevich and others who “would deserve from the Sinai monastery <...> deep gratitude, since it is to them that Sinai first of all owes the actual “preservation of historical cultural heritage”
