a level place, and about it are rocky mountains some distance off. The monastery was established with a surrounding wall and the church was elevated. And there is quite close to it the Monastery of St. Theoctistus, under the mountain only half a day's walk from the Monastery of Euthymius, and all this has been destroyed now by pagans". The monastic complex went through a massive restoration and construction phase in the 12th century during the Crusader period, but was finally abandoned in the next century. Significance of the laura The laura of Euthymius was essential in the advancement and organisation of the Sabaite (desert monastic) movement, and, as the only dyophysite monastery in the Judaean desert at the time of the Council of Chalcedon (451), was central to the development of Chalcedonian orthodoxy within Palestinian monasticism, in what was at first an almost completely anti-Chalcedonian, miaphysite Palestine. Caravanserai (Khan al-Ahmar) Mamluk period After the abandonment of the monastery in the 13th century, during the Mamluk period, the structures were converted during the same century into a travellers' inn, known as Khan al-Ahmar, the "Red Khan", a caravanserai for Muslim pilgrims on the route between Jerusalem and Mecca via Nabi Musa. It should not be confused with nearby Khan al-Hatruri (aka Inn of the Good Samaritan), sometimes referred to as Khan al-Ahmar as well. Ottoman period The Rev. Haskett Smith guided European groups in Palestine in the late nineteenth century and edited the 1892 Murray's Handbooks for Travellers to Syria and Palestine. He recorded a visit to Khan al-Ahmar with a tour group journeying from Jerusalem to Jericho in his 1906 travelogue Patrollers of Palestine: The entrance was through a wide archway in the side nearest to the road, and this archway opened into a covered courtyard with two similar arches at the further end, and doors leading into chambers on either side. Beyond the covered court was a spacious open square, surrounded on three sides by the high walls of the khan, and on the fourth bounded by the chambers and the court. A man in native costume was at one corner of the covered court, making coffee over a charcoal brazier, and at the same time filling and preparing a narghileh. There were several of these narghileh pipes arranged on a shelf near the brazier. The man was the innkeeper, or, as he is known by the natives,