A dispute over the monastery’s financial and administrative autonomy had thrown the monastic community into crisis, with Archbishop Damianos taking drastic measures, sidelining the monastery’s bureaucracy and ultimately escalating the matter by forcibly expelling his opponents, installing private security personnel and shuttering the compound.
After intervention from the Orthodox Patriarchate, Damianos was unseated as monastery head, departing on Saturday to Greece. His exit ushers in an end to one of the most complex internal crises ever to disturb the monastery.
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The crisis erupted in May, when an appeals court in Ismailia issued a final ruling stripping the monastery of ownership over 14 land plots, leaving it with usufruct rights — not ownership — over 57.
Damianos later took steps to sign away more of the monastery’s autonomy, endorsing a new Greek law which granted a public authority based in Athens sweeping powers to manage the monastery’s properties inside and outside Sinai.
In doing so, Damianos bypassed monastery procedure, failing to consult the Council of Monks — an internal body with final say over the monastery’s financial and administrative matters.
The monks denounced the law as “an attempt to place the monastery under external guardianship,” a monk from the monastery told Mada Masr.
As the dispute escalated, the council voted on July 30 to dismiss Damianos, citing monastery statutes that allow the removal of the monastery head in cases of mismanagement or doctrinal deviation. The monks accused him of financial, administrative and doctrinal violations.
Damianos escalated in response, shutting down the monastery and seizing control of its bank accounts, taking advantage of being the only monk with Egyptian citizenship. By the end of August, he brought in private security guards, who forcibly evicted 11 monks from their cells and sealed the monastery’s gates — something unseen in decades. The monks filed formal complaints against him at police stations in Dahab and St. Catherine.
The Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem — which consecrated Damianos more than 50 years ago — weighed in with a series of statements siding with the monks, demanding the immediate reopening of the monastery, the removal of all outsiders and Damianos’s appearance before its Holy Synod in Jerusalem this week.
The following day, Damianos released a statement in which he put the entire dispute down to an “existential crisis” triggered by the Egyptian court ruling in May. He announced plans to begin preparations for succession and the election of a new leader “swiftly but in a proper manner,” in coordination with Egyptian authorities, the Greek government and the Church of Greece.
Private security personnel Damianos brought in at the end of August withdrew from the monastery in the hours after the statement’s September 4 publication, according to the source close to the monks.
At the same time, however, Damianos defended the Greek law in his statement as a “strategic choice” and a “strong and impenetrable shield of protection” against threats to the monastery’s independence. He pressed for recognition of the monastery’s legal independence and leveled sharp criticism at the Patriarchate of Jerusalem, accusing it of seeking to impose guardianship in violation of the monastery’s historic autonomy.
The next day, a high-level Greek delegation arrived in Sharm al-Sheikh, in coordination with Egyptian authorities, to oversee Damianos’s departure. By the morning of September 6, he landed in Athens aboard a private jet, accompanied by nine monks loyal to his leadership, several Greek associates who were present at the monastery and the delegation.
An ecclesiastical source told Mada Masr that Damianos could face ecclesiastical sanctions as severe as his defrocking.
Meanwhile, the source close to the monks said they have already begun reorganizing the monastery’s internal affairs. Elections for a new archbishop and advisory council are expected to begin this week, alongside formal steps to rescind the implementation of the Greek law that tied the monastery to the Athens-based authority.