‘Twas perchance that I stumbled into Coptic Cairo, after a dusty morning gazing at the pyramids and the early noon spent at the Egyptian museum, we’d planned to visit some market after lunch but the restaurant was close to towering church spires that spurred a change of plan and spooled us into their fold…
Somehow, they’re more attuned to monochrome, in photography and in perception… the former due to inedible light and constricted spaces, the latter steeped in the perennial symbiosis and disaccord twixt Abrahamic constructs…
‘Tis a nook of the past that humbles you in your own ignominy of being too condescending about the broad strokes of civilization… these deviances in history… the deviants driven with a purpose of establishing an order that posterity is today disillusioned with anyway…
There’s about a dozen odd buildings of value here, a motley crue one might say, boasting antiquity despite an overtly modernized façade… awkward light, awkward angles, awkward history, I’d admit, being pretty oblivious to the nitty gritties of the pilgrims’ journey and the wars that followed…
I could only go through two monuments – although this is a good instance of living history so there’s no foreboding of things being lost here, they seem to be keeping up with times just fine… the Copts are a majority turned minority – Egyptian Christians evangelized by St. Mark the Apostle in the first century AD and then spreading up to Sudan and Libya – persecuted both by the Romans initially as they grappled with Christianity and then by subsequent Egyptian rulers, they lost their majority status around the fourteenth century
The Hanging Church, believed to be built in 7th century, doesn’t really hang anymore, the hollowness (or the sense of space) beneath now consumed, quite literally, by the sands of time… built above the Babylon Fortress that’s now reduced to a large cellar with the rise in ground level over centuries, one thing worth noticing is the crude yet light and utilitarian wooden construction intact beneath all the renovations and artistic embellishments over centuries…
There’re old brooding paintings, and altars being improvised upon continuously, but beneath it all, is this knot from where religions emerged, and subsequently the disagreements and disembowelments that continue to this day, now also manifesting in barbarities more scientific and inflationary in nature…
The structure has some antiquity intact in parts and brash politics leering at you in others… I was rushing through these buildings to be honest though, sleep deprived and thoroughly disillusioned with the state of affairs, and the affairs of states, pertaining to these inefficacious climate negotiations… so I had a rather sardonic taste in the mouth while trying to make sense of it all among the crowds…
Intrigue is what I usually feel about the Middle East and North Africa… despite the world’s longest river making up for its spine, these are largely arid lands, meagre in the natural resources they provide, and relentless in the temperatures to which they rise and drop… yet it always remained a hotspot of civilization, from geometries for generations to Alexander finding his deified calling here to the Romans revelling in its agricultural wealth… maybe ‘tis because one only had to survive the elements here… there are no dense forests to make one’s way through, nor wildlife and parasites baying for you blood, maybe that’s one reason…
Abu Serga is quainter and quieter… dating to 4th century, ‘tis believed to be built on the spot where the Holy Family rested at the end of their journey into Egypt… and despite it’s rather humble construction, one can feel the gravitas in its walls and wood work… both the Hanging Church and Abu Serga have ceilings designed in the shape of Noah’s Ark… the artwork is a mix of Greco-Roman and Egyptian styles and everything else that emptied itself along the shoes of the Nile… Copts were one of the first to use visual imagery of Jesus and Mary, and there are several examples here…
Copts have had a significant impact upon the evolution of Christianity, especially in development of its theological and philosophical constructs, and establishing monasticism… yet their history is comfortable being in the shadows, and so are they it seems… there’s merit in being content with maintaining a tradition rather than expanding it, one can argue, and it makes even more sense when one had always had their backs against the wall, forever treading the tightrope between politics, economy and religion… I could barely get any photos, but a lot of food for thought this part of town gave aplenty…
Musing on Coptic Cairo, Egypt
