Dead Sea towns around the lake. These towns had drinking water from the Ein Feshcha springs and other sweetwater springs in the vicinity. Intimately connected with the Judean wilderness to its northwest and west, the Dead Sea was a place of escape and refuge. The remoteness of the region attracted Greek Orthodox monks since the Byzantine era. Their monasteries, such as Saint George in Wadi Kelt and Mar Saba in the Judaean Desert, are places of pilgrimage. In the 19th century the River Jordan and the Dead Sea were explored by boat primarily by Christopher Costigan in 1835, Thomas Howard Molyneux in
The Dead River (novel) of the two lovers. Like the other novels of Jakov Xoxa (notably ""White Juga"" ), it encompasses a vast number of characters and is also imbued with the realism of pre-World War II Albania, in which the main story is set. It is one of the few works of early socialist realism in Albania which contains literary merits. As many works of that period, it used the Soviet literary model of Sholokhov's "And Quiet Flows the Don". The Dead River (novel) The Dead River (originally in Albanian ""Lumi i Vdekur"") is the title of the first novel written by the