A Monastery in the Sands: The Greek Orthodox Rural Estate in Caesarea, Israel

ABSTRACT: This article presents a historical overview and an architectural analysis of the Greek monastery in Caesarea/Qisārya, a Late Ottoman and British Mandate agricultural enterprise in the Holy Land (ca. 1909–48). By combining archival records and oral histories with a previously conducted field survey, the article traces the history of the monastery and its agrarian entrepreneurship, and ascribes narrative meaning to its remains. It frames the construction of the monastery and its estate in the context of transnational settlement, imperial geopolitics, rural development of Palestine’s coastal plain in the late nineteenth century, and the dialectic of agricultural technical innovations versus traditional agrarian practices. The Greek Orthodox Church’s efforts at rural land acquisition and improvement—initiated with Russian imperial support prior to the First World War—ultimately failed due to the loss of foreign backing, the growth of Zionist settlement, and the intensifying Arab-Jewish conflict under British rule in Palestine.