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The Decani Monastery in Kosovo's western Prokletije mountains is one of the latest added to the World Heritage List of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Meanwhile, "the monastery's cells are brimming," reports The Christian Science Monitor. "Days are busy with farming, writing, icon-painting, translating, woodcarving, and more. For the first time in decades, Decani is thriving."

The monastic life at Decani has rarely been happy—or safe. The monastery faced lootings in the 16th and 17th centuries, and persecution from Albanians in the 19th century and the Bulgarians, Albanians, and communists of all ethnicities in the 20th century.

During the Kosovo conflict of the late 1990s, the Serbian Orthodox monastery became an important refuge for Muslims and ethnic Albanians even as shocks from nato bombs threatened its fragile onyx sculptures. nato forces still guard the site and its 30 monks, and anti-Serb demonstrations from ethnic Albanians threatened the monastery as recently as last March. "We are living in this monastery like in a prison," Father Nektar told Voice of America (VOA) in October.

It is the 14th-century Byzantine-Romanesque architecture and ancient icons that attracted UNESCO, which notes that the monastery "represents an exceptional synthesis of Byzantine and Western traditions," and "exercised an important influence on the development of art and architecture during the Ottoman period." That makes it, art historians told VOA, "the most significant medieval structure in its part of Europe."

That history can unite Kosovo's warring ethnicities, says Father Sava Janjic, the monastery's deputy abbot. "These places where the beauty and the history and something which is noble is enshrined so deeply in these stones and these frescoes is bringing people together around the values which have eternal meaning," he said.

The consensus in the academy has been that the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in the cliffside caves of Qumran, were written by Essenes, an ascetic, monkish sect that avoided materialism and population centers.

But results of a 10-year-study of Qumran promise to "contradict everything we know about every aspect of the Essenes," says Yizhar Hirschfeld of the Hebrew University's Archaeological Institute. The dig, by Israelis Yitzhak Magen and Yuval Peleg, found imported Phoenician glass, jewelry, perfume bottles, and other non-ascetic artifacts. "It's impossible to say that the people who lived at Qumran were poor," Peleg told the Tel Aviv newspaper Ha'aretz.

Magen, who believes the scrolls were written by Jerusalem temple priests, told the San Francisco Chronicle, "We did not find any evidence that the scrolls were written (at) Qumran or the caves which overlook it. Our conclusion is that they were brought there mainly from Jerusalem across the Judean Desert. We discovered several ancient way stations which once were [first-century] Jewish communities where they could have been kept temporarily in local synagogues before being transferred to the caves of Qumran for safety."

When the 1320s "Macclesfield Psalter" was discovered in 2003 between two larger books in a private collection, it was hailed as the most exciting discovery of an English manuscript in living memory. Created in eastern England, at the foremost school of English art at the time, it may not stay in the country. The Getty Museum in Los Angeles purchased it in June for $2.8 million, and the National Art Collections Fund has until November 10 to attempt to buy it back. The 252-page book is of particular interest for its humorous marginal artworks, many of which scholars believe are satires on the army commander who commissioned the book, John de Warenne, the 8th Earl of Surrey, Earl of Sussex and Strathern. The many rabbits, for example, symbolize the earl's lust (he was excommunicated in 1316 for multiple adulterous affairs), and their burrows (called warrens) were apparently a pun upon his name. Other satirical images include a dog dressed in bishops' robes, an ape playing doctor with a bear, and a man without pants fighting a dragon.

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