dayr anba bishoi (Scetis). [This article encompasses two main topics: history and architecture of Dayr Anba Bishoi. Subtitles under the architectural section are the church, the refectories, and the jawsaq.] History This is one of the surviving ancient monasteries in scetis (modern Wadi al-Natrun). There is no historically reliable information on its foundation, but on the basis of what little is known of the earliest monastic establishments in Scetis, it may be surmised that it grew from a settlement, or laura, of anchorites whose forerunners had gathered around the desert father Bishoi (in medieval Arabic sources, Bishay) from whom the monastery has taken its name. The settlement probably came into being later than those of dayr al-baramus and Dayr Abu Maqar, but before the death of macarius the egyptian, around 390.
According to the various recensions of the Life of Bishoi, whose author claims to be john colobos (the Short), Bishoi's companion during their earlier years in Scetis, the two of them eventually parted company. John stayed in the place where they had most recently lived, while Bishoi moved to a cave 2 miles to the north. Dayr Anba Bishoi is, in fact, about 2 Roman miles northwest of the ruins of the former Monastery of John the Short, but the association and then separation of John and Bishoi in the legend may be no more than an etiological reflection of that topographic reality. After a barbarian raid, which may be the historical raid through Scetis in 407, Bishoi, according to the Arabic recension of the legend, fled to a spot near the city of Antinoë (antinoopolis) and spent the rest of his life there. When he died, his body was taken to Antinoë, where it was to remain for the next four centuries.
In Scetis the monastic settlement to which his memory and his name were attached was quickly revived, but historical information on its subsequent history is very scarce. It obviously shared in the general vicissitudes of monastic establishments in Scetis through the centuries.
Dayr Anba Bishoi was founded between 535 and 580. During that period the Theodosian monks, who adhered to the Christological doctrine of severus of antioch, were in opposition to the Gaianite monks, who adhered to the doctrinal position of julian of Halicarnassus. Since the Gaianites were in temporary control of the existing monasteries, the Theodosian monks established their own monasteries dedicated to the Virgin Mother as counterparts.
It is not known how long any of the monasteries remained in Gaianite control, but it is certain, from the colophons of certain Syrian manuscripts from the middle of the ninth century, that the present dayr al-suryan was originally the counterpart Monastery of the Virgin Mother of God of Anba Bishoi. After a period of general desolation in Scetis resulting from a particularly serious barbarian raid probably in the late sixth century and from the troubled times that preceded the Arab conquest of Egypt, both Dayr Anba Bishoi and its counterpart were rebuilt in the reign of the Coptic patriarch benjamin I (622-661). At the time of another general reconstruction in Scetis during the reign of the patriarch yusab I (830-849), after yet another barbarian destruction around 817, the body of Anba Bishoi was at last transported from its resting place in Antinoë to the monastery in Scetis that bears his name. For greater protection, the enclosure walls of Dayr Anba Bishoi, like those surrounding the other monasteries in Wadi al-Natrun, were fortified sometime before the end of the ninth century. Unlike the monasteries of Abu Maqar and of John the Short, Dayr Anba Bishoi seems to have had no large outlying cells, or "dwellings" (in reality small monasteries in themselves), dependent upon it.
In the statistical list of the monasteries of Wadi al-Natrun drawn up in 1088, there are forty monks listed for the Monastery of Bishoi, more than the numbers listed for the communities of john kama and Baramus and the small "Cave of Moses." However, the number is less than those listed for the Monastery of the Syrians and considerably less than the numbers given for the monasteries of Abu Maqar and of John the Short, which are, however, surely inflated by inclusion of all the monks living in the cells and dwellings dependent on those two monasteries. By 1330 the buildings of Dayr Anba Bishoi were on the verge of collapse because of the damage done by termites in the woodwork. In that year the patriarch benjamin ii intervened personally to assure the monastery's reconstruction as a cooperative project of the monks of various houses, in order to save the community from dispersion. In the late Middle Ages and as recently as the nineteenth century, Dayr Anba Bishoi was at times called the White Monastery, which can lead to its confusion with the White Monastery of Shenute west of Suhaj in Upper Egypt.
Visitors to Wadi al-Nat run in the seventeenth century consistently noted that the church of Dayr Anba Bishoi was in the best condition of all the churches in the region, but the number of monks living in the monastery was very low. C. Sicard discovered only three or four in 1712; there were twelve when General Andréossy visited in 1799, and thirteen when Sir Gardner Wilkinson was there in 1843. In 1976 there were thirty-two monks of the community, twenty-two of them in the monastery and ten in its dependency at Kafr Dawud in the Delta or elsewhere (Meinardus, 1977, p. 67). The Coptic patriarchs gabriel viii and macarius iii were monks of Dayr Anba Bishoi.