Old Cairo

Being a tourist is exhausting. This morning, I went on a tour of Old Cairo in which we visited two churches that claim to be the oldest in Egypt, what claims to be the oldest synagogue, and the Coptic Museum. Then I went to the library and tired to read, but various parts of my body fell asleep so I came home. This reading is never ending. I'm certain that gremlins sneak in and add a page to the book for every one I get through.

Those gremlins can be quite pernicious.

Old Cairo predates Islam, I think. I also think that it is the location of Naguib Mafouz's Cairo Trilogy, but again am not certain. I couldn't hear much of the tour guide's information because I was attempting to navigate windy streets and through perniciously short doorways which forced even vertically challenged Roommate 3 to duck.

Pictures weren't allowed in any of the locations except for the last church, so here are the two images I managed to take. It is called the hanging church, not because of any affinity therein for lynching or for hammocks, but because it was built atop pillars of the even-more-ancient Roman fortress and therefore "hangs" between them. At one place in the church, a window in the floor gave what was supposed to be a view of said pillars, but I couldn't see much.

There was also a stairway down into the nether regions of the church which priests apparently used to hide. There were two times of persecution of Christians, the tour guide told us, the first by the Romans and the second by the Eastern Church after the Egyptian (Coptic) church split from it.

It's always entertaining to hear that this or that part of something is "new" because it was added in the 14th century. The beautiful wood ceiling was added "late," as were some of the windows here.

The tour guide is quite knowledgeable and kindly, but she made some strange distinctions. Actually, they were not strange in the grand scheme of religious belief, but strange to a third generation atheist such as myself. When she was talking about early Egypt, the guide reminded us about Moses, who was found in a basket and raised by the royal family and went on to find tablets or split rivers or something fantastical along those lines. She presented this story as historical fact. Later, when we were in the Hanging Church, she told a story of how in the 14th century of something the church was threatened by the Muslim leader and told that, unless the head priest could produce a miracle, it would be demolished. Specifically, the priest was asked to move the Mucattam hills (I have no idea how to spell that, but it's the limestone area from whose product edifices like the pyramids are made). After he spent days in prayer, the Virgin Mary appeared to the priest and told him that a blind cobbler would help him with the miracle. Long story short, he found said cobbler right outside, took him to the hills and when they got there an earthquake struck and the hills moved.

She presented that as a rather fanciful story. And it is a fanciful story, but is it any more so than any other?