Natives and descendants

Even when the trip to Cairo was arranged, we were ready to give up the pyramids in order to get to see the Copts, around whom spread the aura of a very unusual combination of cultural spices - the dexterity of the ancient Egyptians, the spirituality of the Greeks and the passion of the Arabs, the fragrance of Africa in a bottle. The Copts were in our thoughts throughout the preparation; they seemed like a completely unknown island in the sea of ​​impressions and preconceptions we had about the country we were traveling to.

A night flight over the land of Egypt revealed a beautiful, flickering field of green fireflies. Those lights from the mosques were the only thing visible in the dark, and we wondered where our island with the Copts was...

You always get what you really want, it was quickly shown to us; Tamer Mina, the guide that caught our eye, is a Copt and also specializes in the religion of Egypt!

"You know what an ancient Egyptian looked like," he taught us at the national museum, "just what I look like." Short, broad-shouldered, with a big stomach and copper-colored skin." Tamer, just like the ancient Egyptians, is very proud of his skin color, his ancestors considered it more desirable than the very dark skin of immigrants from other African countries, but also the very white of those who came to them by ship across the Mediterranean.

HEIRS: Copts are direct descendants of the ancient Egyptians, conscientious and faithful heirs of the old civilization. (Muslims are much more reserved when it comes to monuments of ancient culture, considering them pagan landmarks.) Their name comes from the Arabic term Kibt, their pronunciation of the Greek word for Egyptian. The Coptic language, the last form of the Egyptian language, received a large number of Greek words and the Greek alphabet, which with seven hieroglyphic characters forms the Coptic alphabet. Today they speak Arabic, and the Coptic language is used in liturgies. Just like Tamer's, Copts most often bear surnames derived from the names of old rulers - Mina or Ramses, for example.

It was already late in the afternoon when we finished with the Museum of Ancient Egyptian Culture, one of the richest and most important in the world. Full of impressions, we reclined in the back seat in a sweet slumber. Tamer's voice reached us from afar. He said something about the part of the city where the so-called garbage collectors live, people who collect and sort Cairo's garbage; the huge city offered them the opportunity to earn a real fortune. That whole neighborhood, which looks like a nunnery without roofs, is inhabited by Copts, who hold a monopoly in that business. Although Tamer prepared us for what we were about to see, the scene that followed far exceeded all expectations.

The driver sped up, overcoming a slight ascent, and narrow streets in the shade opened up before us. To the left and right we passed huge stacks of large garbage bags, houses built without a front facade revealed rooms and kitchens full of bags between which the housewives skillfully moved. In front of the houses, on huge piles of anything and everything, from old furniture to pyramidal piles of cardboard, the householders sat comfortably reclining, while children and pets ran up and down, because the piles sometimes reached the roofs of two-story buildings. It stank terribly and even to this day we don't know if that was the reason why the driver sped through streets barely wide enough for a car. We've been missing out on some awesome photos – guys in a restaurant that's actually a slightly larger dining room full of stacked "goods"; a drag store in the same style, a boutique that can be reached by climbing up the bales whose dresses and curtains are hanging on the facade... The driver sometimes slowed down to turn left or right with skillful maneuvering, and a calmer picture in the car window revealed paper icons on the walls of the dark rooms of the warehouse, mostly with the image of Christ, almost in every room. Musava, very dirty and endlessly cheerful children ran across our path; the only one we met when the nervous driver stopped was a little boy next to the old bin who responded to the outstretched hand through the window with a touch of his finger and a smile.

(NE)TYPICAL COPTS: Tamer explained to us that the authorities don't like foreigners being brought to this part of the city, just like they don't like it when crowded buses or neglected monuments are photographed. The city authorities recently signed a contract with a well-known company for waste processing, but the Copts immediately raised an alarm and threatened a strike, because it would mean several thousand of them without any livelihood. It was then shown that they like their life like that and that they don't want to change it.

It should be said that they are not so typical Copts. Christians in Egypt actually represent an educated elite, engaged in large numbers in important government and administrative jobs. They are an economically very strong and independent minority - Copts, together with other Christians, make up only six percent, while Muslims make up 94 percent of the total population. As we heard in Egypt on one occasion, together with the large Coptic community in the USA and some other groups scattered around the world, the total number of Copts is around 20 million.

The reason why we headed through this suburb of Cairo in the first place soon became clear to us. Tamer took us to see two truly magnificent churches built by the Copts in the last century. Both Mukatam temples were built in the small mountain we managed to climb. The first church hollowed out like a cave was made for 5000 people; the second, a huge amphitheater in the mountain, even for 25.000. Copts have been making them for years. The repression carried out by the Muslims against them was enormous during the period of Nasser's rule. Tamer explains to us that usually every request to build a church ended with a commission that would go out to the field to assess the situation and assign the site to Muslims. The Copts therefore secretly dug a church on the spot where their saint supposedly performed several miracles. They used the moments when the call to prayer for Muslims started with a song from the minaret, and in the shadow of this music they dug the church. At one point, the government suspected that something was happening, so it built an observation post for the Egyptian state security service on top of that hill. Nevertheless, the smaller church was practically finished when the commission came to visit them. The Copts knew very well and many times used the loophole in the law based on the Koran - no religious building can be demolished. Today it is a beautiful center of the Coptic religion, decorated and fenced. Asphalted footpaths are decorated with lianders, which is not easy considering Cairo's climate, and the surrounding rocks are full of icons. They are in relief, just like the icons in the churches themselves. On the approach to Mukatam, where until then the city-tamed mountain wriggles and freely shoots into the clouds, its entire foothills, up to a height of several tens of meters, are decorated with scenes from the Old and New Testaments. How those reliefs look in the shadow of the caves... The Copts, as can be seen from the choice of display, remained much more interested in the Old Testament than European Christians.

NEW VERSION FLOOD: The churches in old Cairo, to which Tamer took us already at dusk, confirmed these observations. In one of them, the roof of the church represents the bottom of the ship. The Copts are very attached to the story of the flood. "We live in the world of Muslims, which is a sea for us. Our faith is Noah's Ark to us," Tamer tells us. We take a look at that Noah's ark, it seems intimate, restrained and much more oriented in appearance

To God rather than to people. There is not much there that wants to impress with beauty (and how beautiful it is). Everything they wanted to say the Copts said with symbolism, and to understand how they love God and what they are saying to him, you take the key and read. An iconostasis without an icon, full of ornaments. Tamer's explanation speaks of the ten-cross circle (Old Testament) and the twelve-cross circle (New Testament). There is also a hidden slit through which the door was watched. If someone came by, the secret liturgy was interrupted, and the holy gifts were taken to a safe place through a hidden corridor... The pulpit, seemingly quite ordinary, stands on 15 pillars - Christ in front of everyone, behind him in a row of two, like in a school behind the teacher, the apostles, finally the two evangelists, Matthew and Mark, who were not apostles. All the pillars are the same, only one black - Judas, and one dark - unfaithful Thomas.

Today, Copts live with Muslims in harmony and mutual respect, at least that's how it seems, and that's what our guide says.

In the past, long before they were enslaved by the Arabs, the Copts' enemy was Byzantium, and they resisted its dogma in every possible way. They finally separated from the other Orthodox at the Council of Chalcedon in 451, when the dual nature of Christ, divine and human, was proclaimed, which the Copts, wishing to remain Monophysite, used to separate their own, the Patriarchate of Alexandria. Although during the conquest of Egypt in 641 the Arabs massively converted them to Islam, putting even the Coptic Church under their direct control, in some honest conversations we had the opportunity to hear that the Arab conquest was greatly facilitated by the desire of the Copts to break free from the tight grip of Byzantium.

Could it also be connected with the recent negotiations between the Copts and the European Orthodox on reunification, which ended ingloriously? Copts were the ones who gave up after long negotiations, believing that Europe would corrupt them. Although officially the Serbian, Greek, and Russian Orthodox churches treat the Coptic religion as a heresy, there is enormous respect for them among Christians on this side of the Mediterranean Sea. How could it not be when the Copts were the first to establish monastic orders.

At the time when the new faith came to the soil of Egypt, taking root first among the Greeks and Jews who mainly lived in Alexandria and along the Mediterranean coast, the Egyptians increasingly retreated to upper Egypt, avoiding the pressure of Byzantine culture. However, inclined to strict piety, the natives soon accepted Christianity much more passionately. Sometime in the second century, the world metropolis of Alexandria enjoyed the status of a great theological school, but the Egyptians, having received the faith, still kept aloof. It will be that the Copts were driven into the desert precisely by the licentiousness and superficiality, but also by the recklessness of the Byzantine conquerors. Taking refuge there to preserve peace and devote themselves to prayer, the Copts founded the first monastic orders in the world. As the zero monk, the young Egyptian Christian Saint Anthony from the 3rd century is taken who, as interpreted by Trevor Ling, wanted to follow the apostolic path against the dissolute life of Alexandria and therefore retired to the nearby desert to live as a hermit. The first monastic communities were created while Saint Anthony was still alive. They were founded in Upper Egypt by Saint Pachomius, and according to the records of the monastic rules from that time, it is clear that they have not changed much to this day. That part of Egypt (at the very root of Sinai's Great Tooth) is extremely impassable and if you want to visit the hermitages of these two great early Christian saints, you need a guide because the desert is dangerous and it's easy to get lost. It is recommended to start your tour from the Church of Saint Pachomius. You will know that everything is fine if after two days of hiking you see the outlines of St. Anthony's Church. It's worth it, Tamer told us at parting, all that effort. Children's large and warm eyes on Coptic icons are among the most beautiful examples of Christian art in the world.