Britain's most unusual monastery? Tucked away in a Yorkshire village, these Egyptian monks have converted a former B&B once owned by the Rowntree chocolate dynasty and taught themselves how to farm from watching Youtube
AdvertisementThe path to the chapel, where I am joining some of the monks for their 9am Mass, is lined with life-size Stations of the Cross, a sequence of statues depicting the day of Jesus’ crucifixion. Although they have churches in some of the big cities, this is the Copts’ only monastery in the UK.
They return at around four or five in the afternoon, and have a prayer service at six, followed by dinner, and then a sung prayer service from eleven at night to one in the morning. In between, they find time to pray, and to read the Bible and texts written by desert-dwelling Egyptian monks in the first few centuries of Christianity. Some of them then have to wake up early to bake the bread which will be used for Communion in that day’s Mass.
As well as the sheep, they have more than a thousand lambs, and five cows. It’s about self-sufficiency, he tells me.The monks are not allowed to work in the world outside, and so they raise livestock for food, and to sell to local butchers for money, which they then spend on essentials they cannot produce themselves.
In Egypt, another monk, Fr Arsenius, says, monasteries are built in the desert, and so have much more land, which they often use to build workshops and factories, producing everything from wooden furnishings to electronics cables. Often visitors to monasteries in Egypt will volunteer to help with the work while they stay.“Here,” Fr Arsenius jokes,”everyone is much more busy, so if we want labourers we have to pay them, and then we have no profits left.
The central building – a manor house built by the Rowntree family of York, although recently it had served as a B&B – was then doubled in size, an expansion which has preserved the original character of the building so well it is virtually impossible to tell until it is pointed out.Work, moreover, is already under way on the monks’ most ambitious project yet, the construction of a two-storey church built in the Egyptian style, complete with two domed spires.
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