0 Dayr anba shinuda (or el dayr el abyad history)

The church of this famous monastery still exists at the edge of the Libyan Desert on the left bank of the Nile about 6 miles (10 km) from the town of suhaj often mentioned for its medieval paintings.

The name of the site is known from mummy labels which give the Egyptian name “atripe” (Arabic, adribah) and the Hellenized name triphiou both of which come from the paranoiac Egyptian hwt-rpyt  (house of the goddess) triphis see cerny,1976,p. 343). The place has often been confused with atrib in the delta and also with athlibis, which seems to have been close to it without being identified with it (as by timm, vol. 2, p. 602).

 Very early, perhaps before the beginning of the fourth century, the mountain of adribah was frequented by Christian hermits. The Coptic fragments of the life of the martyr-monks panine and paneu do not speak of it, but it is mentioned in the long notice of the recension of the synaxarion from Upper Egypt. This speaks of their sojourn in the region and names the town of idfa (not to be confused with the town of idfa)

And adribah. According to the Coptic tradition of the synaxarion (7 kiyahk), the beginnings of Christianity in the region date from long before shenute. For later periods, we must have recourse to the information preserved for us by the life of shenute (in Arabic, shinuda), written by his disciple and successor besa.

At the age of seven shenute was entrusted to his uncle anba pjol, who gave him the monastic habit. He lived for some time with his uncle, who was a hermit in the mountain of adribah, and also with abshay (in Coptic, pshoi), the titular head of a monastery near that of shinudah. He thus in the beginning followed the life of a hermit, and it is related in his life, especially in the Arabic life, that he often went off alone far into the desert and gave orders that he was not to be disturbed under any pretext we have no documents to fix the chronology of the events in the life of shenute. We know only that he took part with aptriarch Cyril I in the council of Ephesus in 431. That he struggled violently against all the manifestation of paganism still alive at plewit (the present banawit) and at akhmim and that he died in 466(Bethune-baker, 1908. pp. 601-605).  

 The church:

The church of the monastery  consists of an immense block-like structure, widely visible, which re- calls the form of a pharaonic temple (deichmann, 1938, p. 34). Inside, it comprises several large spatial units, of which the area belonging to the church proper is on the north side .

It may be divided in to the western narthex the naos devolved as a three aisle basilica with a western return aisle and galleries and in the east the group of rooms forming the sanctuary. In the autumn of 1984 the naos was cleared of  its modern civilian structures by the Egyptian antiquities organization and it again presents some impression of its original greatness the sanctuary of the church is developed as a triconch the walls of which are adorned with niches and applied columns.