One of Kazazian’s beautiful photographs of the Monastery of St. Anthony (looking east from the monastery)
The Byzantine Institute and Dumbarton Oaks Fieldwork Records and Papers, ca. late 1920s-2000s (MS.BZ.004, Image Collections and Fieldwork Archives, Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, D.C.) has a large collection of vintage photographs from 1931-2 of the Monastery of Saint Anthony at the Red Sea, Egypt.
The photographs were taken during the Thomas Whittemore’s Expedition, an American archaeologist, in 1930-1 (actually, two visits in the winters of these two years), and were taken by the mission’s photographer, Kazazian, a famous Armenian photographer.
The pictures are perhaps the first photographic documentary of the ancient Coptic monastery of St. Anthony, which is dated to the 4th century, capturing the 1930’s structure of its walls, pulley, towers, keep, churches, guest house, mill, bakery, oven, kitchen, refectory, storeroom, springs, cisterns, garden, streets, courts, pasture, murals and paintings, library, St. Anthony’s Cave, cells, and the monks in their daily life and work. And in this sense, they are invaluable. They are all in black and white, and numbering 104.
I have shared some with you in a previous article; but now I share all 104 photographs with you:
First 30 photographs, you can find here
Next photographs (31-60), you can find here
Next photographs (61-30), you can find here
The remaining photographs (91-104), you can find here
