Egypt 15: Religious Quarter

 The Religious Quarter, also known as Coptic Cairo, has important houses of worship.

One is the Ben Ezra Synagogue. I took no pictures there because we were asked not to.  But you can find some here. It was founded in the ninth century and is in beautiful shape but is no longer in use (because there are fewer than fifty Jews living in Egypt).  It is famous because in the nineteenth century someone made an amazing discovery in the geniza.   In Jewish religion a text with God's name can only be disposed of by burying it. A geniza is a storeroom where such texts are kept until they can be taken care of. Apparently no one had emptied the Cairo geniza for centuries and researchers have found, not only religious texts, but letter, accounting papers, and so on: something like 300,000 medieval documents. About 500 are about trade with India.  The result is that scholars now know more about 11th century Cairo than they do about, say,  11th century Paris.

I had certainly heard of Coptic Christianity but I didn't know it simply meant the form of Christianity that developed in Egypt.  We visited a couple of the Coptic Churches in the area known as Old Cairo.

 

Next: Flora and Fauna