few hours outside the city to the Deir Mar Musa monastery. It's
remote enough that you can see the ground through the piles of trash
on the side of the highway as you approach, meaning that it gets less
traffic than the towns outside Damascus. That, and you have to climb
halfway up a mountain to get there.
The monastery itself dates back to the 6th Century, but the current
proprietor, Abu Paulo, restored it and built it up a lot in the '90s.
The monks aren't particularly fat or tonsured and don't spend there
days drinking beer, but apart from that they fit the image: they pray
a lot, sleep in stone-walled cells, and wear tunics around. The
services including Sunday Mass were in Arabic (In nomine Rubb wa Ibn
wa Ruh al-Qudis).
The hills around the monastery are craggy and very dry, and I think I
found a fossil on top of one of them (see photo, above).
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