St. Stephen's Day and church

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On the day after happy Christmas comes the sad story of Saint Stephen's Day.
Stephen was stoned to death in the year 34 or 35, probably just outside the Damascus Gate of the Old City of Jerusalem.

The Dominicans purchased the land in 1884, did excavations, and then built the new basilica of St. Stephen, Protomartyr.

In French its name is Saint Etienne.

I read here that "The original church was built by the Empress Eudocia at the end of the fifth century to house the relics of St. Stephen, the first Christian martyr, and the adjoining monastery complex was so large that by the beginning of the sixth century it housed close to 10,000 monks."
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Well, there are Dominican monks there at the Priory today, but not ten thousand!

On an ancient column the freres inscribed the Roman numerals for 460, the year of the original Byzantine church over which the modern one was built and re-dedicated in 1900 (MCM).

Also home to the famed Ecole Biblique et Archeologique Francaise, this is a beautiful and quiet place of prayer and of study.

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(See an earlier post about their First Temple period burial complexes. )

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UPDATE: I woke up this morning worrying. -- Surely there could not have been 10,000 monks living here, as in my quotation!

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So further research revealed this:

"The walled monastic compound was the largest of all church structures in or around Jerusalem for over a century, larger even than the precincts of the Golgotha complex. Evagrius described the site as "a vast temenos [sacred enclosure], remarkable for its proportions and for its beauty." Cyril of Scythopolis referred to the compound as a "diocese" due to its size, and wrote that the grounds were large enough to house the 10,000 who gathered for a monastic revolt in 516 to protest the Emperor's opposition to the Council of Chalcedon."

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This is from a remarkable project called

The Byzantine St. Stephen's Project, A Biocultural Reconstruction of Urban Monasticism.

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Another source explains that "10,000 seems to be a literary exaggeration. Based on the archaeological record, the entire population of monks in the Judean desert was estimated to be 3,000. . . . Many medieval pilgrims, impressed by the numerous caverns in the Kidron cliffs, claimed that the number of monks in the past was 10,000. . . ."

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