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The earliest Maronite contact with the Holy Land can be traced back to Saint Maroun's own time, when two ascetic women of the Saint's disciples, Marana and Kyra, "eager one day to contemplate the places hallowed by Christ's salvational sufferings, ran to Æolia (Jerusalem) without having eaten for the whole trip, but once in the Holy City and their devotions made, they had some food then fasted the whole way back, which is no less than twenty days' walk," wrote Theodoret of Cyr (Migne 1982: 1418, 1431). There are no documents to prove the somewhat stable existence of Maronites in the Holy Land before the Crusades. We cannot rely on the so-called Omar Decree of 638 which mentions the Maronites, because the text of the decree (which is mentioned by the Greek-Hellenic Gregory) was written in 1625, a thousand years… Περισσότερα...