On a rocky height in the town of Saydnaya, about forty kilometres north of Damascus, stands one of the most venerated shrines of the Church of Antioch: the Patriarchal Monastery of Our Lady of Saydnaya. For centuries Christians, and many Muslims too, have climbed to it to pray before an icon of the Mother of God known as the Shaghoura.

The founding tradition

According to tradition the monastery was founded by the Byzantine emperor Justinian I in 547. While hunting in the area he pursued a gazelle up the mountain; at the summit the animal turned into an image of the Virgin, who asked him to build a church on the spot. The monastery was dedicated, the story continues, on 8 September, the feast of the Nativity of the Mother of God, and that day remains the great feast of Saydnaya, when pilgrims fill the town.

The Shaghoura

The monastery's treasure is an icon of the Theotokos attributed by tradition to St Luke the Evangelist, whom Orthodox tradition remembers as the first iconographer. It is called the Shaghoura, an Arabic word usually translated as "the renowned". The icon is not displayed openly. It is kept in a small shrine separate from the main church, hidden behind a niche with silver doors, before which pilgrims pray and light candles.

A medieval pilgrimage

Saydnaya was famous far beyond Syria in the Middle Ages. Western pilgrims and travellers of the Crusader period, among them Thietmar and Burchard of Strasbourg, described visits to the shrine. Several Latin accounts speak of the icon as having become "incarnate" and as exuding a healing oil; Arabic-language sources do not describe it in that way. These accounts show how widely the shrine was known across the Christian world.

A living convent

Saydnaya belongs to the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch, and it is home to a community of nuns. The monastery has been rebuilt and enlarged many times over its long history, so its present buildings are much later than the tradition of its founding. It remains a place of daily prayer as well as pilgrimage.

Why it matters

Few shrines express the continuity of the Antiochian Church as clearly as Saydnaya. Its story links the age of Justinian, the medieval pilgrimage routes and the Christians of Syria today, all gathered around an icon of the Mother of God.