Summary
Vanja Bulić: The Testament of Sinai
How to read what is not written.
In newly awakened Belgrade, in front of the Jewish synagogue, the Orthodox monk Arcadia was killed. At the autopsy, the doctor states that the monk had a chip implanted under the skin in the armpit. The murder is shrouded in secrecy, encouraged by the silence of the police and judiciary. Journalist Novak Ivanović, despite being banned from investigating and writing about it, with the help of private detective Obrad learns that the murdered monk has a triple identity and that he came to Belgrade thanks to the cooperation of the secret police of Serbia and Israel. Novak's attention is finally drawn to the Sinai Psalter, a prayer book written in Glagolitic in the eleventh century, with 209 pages found so far. The secret services of several countries and an investment fund from America are searching for the missing pages... What was on the stolen pages? Do they hide the ancestral agreement on the division of the Sinai desert, which joins Israel and Egypt? Do these pages hide an agreement on the future of Palestine?
Why did the false monk of Arcadia look for the lost pages in Serbia? Two monasteries - Tumane and Gornjak - are in many ways connected to Sinai and the Monastery of St. Catherine, where the Sinai Psalter was created. Novak visits those monasteries and meets the hermit Zosim, whom the monks say is the "keeper of the secret"...
A tense drama with several mysterious murders is resolved in the ravines of the Gornjačka gorge, in the ruined monastery of the Annunciation...
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