Saint George Monastery in Wadi Qelt

The Saint George Monastery is not visible from the road. To reach it you descend on foot into Wadi Qelt, a deep gorge cut by a winter stream between the Judean Desert and the hills above Jericho, and the monastery appears only gradually as the path narrows and the canyon walls rise on either side. The approach takes about thirty minutes from the parking area, winding through a landscape of pale limestone and thorny acacia, until the cliff face opens and the monastery suddenly appears — a cluster of small whitewashed buildings, a bell tower and a golden dome built hard against the rock, with the green of cultivated terraces below and the bare brown hillsides above.

The monastery occupies a network of natural caves in the cliff face, adapted over centuries into a compact religious complex. The main chapel is a cave entered through a carved doorway, its interior decorated with icons and frescoes of Saint George killing the dragon, as well as older Byzantine-era paintings that have survived in the drier upper chambers. The cave itself is said to be where Saint George hid during the Roman persecutions, and the tradition of the site predates the current building by several centuries. Monks have been in continuous residence since the monastery was formally established in the 17th century, following a period of abandonment after the 6th century.

The setting is extreme by any measure. Wadi Qelt is a desert gorge — annual rainfall is below 100mm — yet the monastery gardens are green, irrigated by a system of channels fed from springs in the upper wadi. The monks grow vegetables, olives and grapes in small terraced plots immediately below the cliff, and the sound of running water from these channels is the first thing you hear on the approach. The contrast between the green garden and the brown desert hillside immediately above is stark and deliberate: the monastery has made an oasis in the desert through sustained human effort, and the gardens are as much a part of the site as the chapel.

The path through Wadi Qelt follows the line of an ancient road that Romans built through the gorge and that the New Testament references in the parable of the Good Samaritan. The road was a main route between Jerusalem and the Jordan Valley in antiquity, and the monastery grew up at a point where travellers needed shelter and where the cliffs offered natural protection. Today the road is gone and the main access is the footpath from the Jerusalem–Dead Sea road, but the sense of the monastery as an island of shelter in a hostile landscape remains.

The monastery is at its most beautiful in the early morning, when the first light catches the dome and the cliff face glows pink and gold while the gorge below is still in shadow. The evening light is equally striking, the warm stone of the monastery walls picked out against the darkening desert. Between these two extremes the desert dominates: the light is flat and bleached, the colours muted, the silence total except for the sound of the water channels and, occasionally, the call to prayer from a mosque in a village somewhere above the gorge.

The Wadi Qelt gorge is one of the most dramatic natural landscapes in the Judean Desert, with a perennial stream that creates a green corridor through otherwise barren terrain — the monastery at its heart is the finest expression of the oasis quality of this place.

The Greek Orthodox tradition at Saint George's is continuous and living: monks have maintained the site since the 17th century and the cave-chapel contains both ancient Byzantine frescoes and a living liturgical tradition.

The site can be combined with visits to the Mount of Temptation monastery and the ancient city of Jericho for a full day in the Jordan Valley.