Zuqnin Monastery

Zuqnīn Monastery was a Syriac Orthodox monastery near Diyarbakır in Turkey. It produced one patriarch and fourteen bishops.

History

The Zuqnīn Monastery was founded in the fourth century and had become a centre of learning by the middle of the century. The hagiography of Saint Matthew the Hermit attests that he had been a monk at the monastery, by which point it had become known for its library and teachers, some time prior to the persecutions of the Roman Emperor Julian (r. 361–363). In John of Ephesus' Lives of the Eastern Saints, it is recorded that the monastery was gifted with half of the village of Nardo in Ingilene by the prior of the nearby Monastery of Mar Yoḥannan Urṭaya after having been endowed with the village by imperial decree, likely by Emperor Zeno, in the latter part of the fifth century. It has been suggested that the Zuqnīn Monastery could be identified with the monastery of Tella-d-tūthē ("hill of the sycamore" in Syriac), where miaphysite monks from nearby monasteries took refuge during the persecutions of Ephraim of Antioch in the sixth century.

Matthew, metropolitan bishop of Aleppo, (fl. 669), Theodotus of Amida (d. 698), and Thomas, metropolitan bishop of Amida, (d. c. 700) are noted as former monks of the monastery. According to the Ecclesiastical History of Bar Hebraeus, the Patriarch Iwannis I (r. 739/740–754/755) had been a monk at the Zuqnīn Monastery. Forty-two monks died from disease at the monastery in 750/751 (AG 1062). The Zuqnin Chronicle was written by a monk at the Zuqnīn Monastery during the reign of Caliph al-Mansur (r. 754–775). It was abandoned in the tenth century.

References

Notes

Citations