Excavating the Monastery of St. Aaron

The text presents the genesis, goals, and achievements of the Finnish Jabal Haroun project (FJHP), the first, large-scale Finnish archaeological project in the Near East. In addition to its scholarly goals, the project serves to train the new cadres of Finnish archaeologists and it popularizes in Finland the knowledge of the Byzantine culture. The project consists of two major parts. One is the excavations of a Byzantine monastery on the Mountain of Aaron near Petra. The other part of the project is the survey of the environs of the mountain.