This page is subject to the extended confirmed restriction related to the Arab-Israeli conflict.Deir Hajla or Deir Hijleh[1] is the Arabic name of the Greek Orthodox Monastery of Saint Gerasimus (officially the Holy Monastery of Saint Gerasimos of the Jordan,[2] Greek: Ιερά Μονή Αγίου Γερασίμου του Ιορδανίτη), a monastery located in the Jericho Governorate of the State of Palestine, in the West Bank, west of the River Jordan and north of the Dead Sea.

[11] The nearby spring is called similarly, 'Ein Hajla[4] ('Spring of the Partridge'), and is situated little over a kilometre to the northeast of the modern monastery.

[13] Deir Hajla is in the vicinity of Al-Maghtas/Qasr al-Yahud, the traditional site of the baptism of Jesus, a fact that has attracted Christian hermits and pilgrims to the area in the past[3] and again in the modern period.

"Alon Alath, now Bethagla" (Ancient Greek: Αλων Αταθ ηνυν Βηθαγλα), is shown on the Madaba Map a little south-east of Jericho.

While Epiphanius (4th-century) describes the same place as Aṭaṭ,[17] or what is effectually translated as the "threshing floor of the thorn bush," he gives no identification of the site.

Although some 19th-century researchers assumed that the presumably Crusader-time ruins they saw were a continuation of a Byzantine monastery, more recent surveys indicate that the only remains datable to the Byzantine period are clusters of simple hermit cells present in relatively large number near the modern monastery and along the dry riverbed gulches (wadis) north of it, with a few more to the south.

[3] The monastery today is replete with a surrounding wall, and contains a garden with some of the oldest known specimens of sycamore figs (Ficus sycomorus) found east of the watershed.

[3] The sources inform us that the hermits from the laura of Gerasimos lived in isolated, spartan cells spread around the plain, which could be confirmed by archaeological surveys.

[3] There they had a church, a kitchen, a refectory, storage areas, and a dwelling wing, so that they could enjoy their only hot meals of the week, drink wine, and pray together, before going back to their cells.

[4] It has been tentatively identified with a site less than a kilometre northeast of the modern St Gerasimus Monastery, near the spring of 'Ein Hajla.

[3] Archaeological surveys identified a cluster of ancient cells in the immediate vicinity of the modern monastery, eleven in total, which are in their majority located to the east of it.

[3] As a result, when the Life of Gerasimus was written, the author was able to state that the laura consisted of seventy hermit cells–which the modern surveyor, who even identified a total of ninety in the area, takes to mean the entirety of cells spread around the monastery founded by Gerasimus, actually belonging to a number of different laura-type communities.

[5] They restored only very few of the many abandoned Byzantine monasteries in the Judean desert and the wilderness of the Jordan, and Deir Hajla was one of them.

[4] He calls it the "monastery of the Holy Virgin at Kalamoniya" and mentions a miraculous icon, described later in the same century by John Phokas as resembling the famous Hodegetria of Constantinople.

[4] This miracle-working and perfume-emanating icon, held by tradition to have been painted by Luke the Evangelist himself,[22] is now preserved in the chapel of St. Constantine Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem.

[4] The PEF's Survey of Western Palestine (SWP) visited Kusr Hajlah[29] in 1873 and 1875, and described it: "An important ruin of a mediaeval monastery.

South of the smaller chapel there is a large cistern or birkeh, which must have formed the principal water supply of the monastery.

"[30]In April 1882, C. R. Conder revisited the site, finding that "the Greek monks from Mar Saba were engaged in building a new monastery on the spot, and had deliberately scraped off all the frescoes.