By Phoebe Farag Mikhail

A few months ago, on a visit to Egypt, I had the opportunity to visit the ancient archeological heritage site, Abu Mena, just outside the modern Monastery of St. Mina near Alexandria. Believers from all over the ancient world traveled to Abu Mena to receive healing from the springs of water that flowed there and to venerate the relics of St. Mena the Wonderworker. They attributed to him the many miracles that happened at those springs, and believed the holy martyr’s relics gave the waters their healing power. According to our tour guide at Abu Mena, in the early centuries it rivaled Jerusalem as a major Christian pilgrimage center. From there, pilgrims would take home (or continue on to Sinai or Jerusalem with) clay flasks imprinted with the icon of St. Mena and filled with water or oil.

Some of those flasks, dating back to 610 A.D., have made their own pilgrimage from the ancient city of Abu Mena to the modern city of New York, where you can now see them on display at the new Africa and Byzantium exhibition on at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. You can hear me talk more about them on audio guide #543 on the exhibit website.

On Monday I had the honor of previewing the exhibition, officially opening to the public on November 19^th, 2024 and staying in New York until March 2, 2024, when it will then go to the Cleveland Museum of Art in Ohio.  

I confess that the exhibition brought me to tears. One of the artefacts hails from one of my favorite monasteries, Deir El Suryan, an ancient and still operating monastery I have visited often but where I would never have seen this manuscript, because it is otherwise kept at the Vatican Library and on loan to the Met for this exhibition. This 12^th– to 14^th century “Polyglot Psalter” opens to a beautiful page of Iota art (a cross design patterned on the letter “iota”) on the left, and then a Psalm in five languages: Ethiopic, Syriac, Coptic, Arabic and Armenian. It hails from a time when Deir el Suryan was a multilingual monastery with monks from all over the world inhabiting it at different times. With a psalter like this, they might have prayed together in different tongues.

The manuscript gives me the sense that Christians in previous centuries interacted and engaged with each other across languages and borders more often, and with more depth, than I think we do now. And to me, it connects so many of the other objects in the exhibit that hail from these various places. I shed tears at the opportunity to see this beautiful book right here at the Met, a place very different from Deir El Suryan, and yet so similar in the meaningful way it also gathers people from so many different cultures and backgrounds to share a common–dare I say, spiritual? experience.

My family and I had some hope during that same trip to Egypt that we might also visit Sudan, but sadly, a civil war broke out at the exact same time. This war also meant that some important objects from the National Museum of Sudan that were going to be loaned to this exhibition did not make it there. Still, the Nubian Christian Faras wall paintings, on loan from the Faras Gallery at the National Museum in Warsaw, Poland, took my breath way. Photographs don’t do these works justice—they must be seen in person. This is a photograph of a beautiful wall painting of the Holy Theotokos holding Christ. In real life, you can see the depth in their eyes and imagine the vivid color they once were.

The exhibit includes sacred items and images from many religious communities of Africa during and soon after the Byzantine period, and also many cultural ones. I loved this second century, larger than life portrait of a woman in Fayoum—can you see a resemblance?

I can’t guarantee that the new Africa and Byzantium exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art will bring you to tears as it did me, but I can guarantee that you will experience an awe-inspiring collection of art and artefacts never before gathered into one exhibition like this one. If you don’t live in or near New York City, this exhibition is worth traveling to see – considering how far some of these objects have traveled through time and space just to get here.

The exhibition book, Africa and Byzantium, is also available for even more in-depth descriptions of the objects in the exhibit. Purchase it at the Met Museum Shop | Yale University Press | Bookshop | Amazon.