Posts Tagged architecture

Kharga Oasis, Egypt, historical, coptic Christian mud tombs

Wednesday, September 16th, 2009

Christian Tombs

Coptic Christian historical graves in Egyptian Oasis

I felt of writing quite a long blog post today, I hope you don’t mind :)

On our honeymoon, we decided to go to historical Egypt. It was kind of swedish summer there at the time, which suited us perfect (I find it kind of difficult to function proper when it’s too hot). We saw some really interesting places there, like our excursion to the Coptic Christian mud tombs and graves, in the Kharga Oasis!

The Coptic Christian religion is the biggest christian church in Egypt.

It was fantastic to actually see those extremely old frescoes on the walls and roofs. Unfortunately, you are not allowed to take flash photos of those paintings, but the guide, as always, said that it was OK. The only issue was money, nothing else. It sure was very tempting to do so, but I never did. I thought that, okay maybe I can do this once, just to show people around the world what the frescoes looks like, on the remains site. It was probably once in a life time opportunity. But no. Both me and the poor guards could get into real big trouble if I had done that and somebody actually checked my camera.

I actually DID take a photo of an old mummy, with the guide’s permission, but as we left, the guards stopped our vehicle and I erased the photo very quickly, just in case.

Anyhow, as my wife was resting in the jeep and our driver was fixing a tyre, I went into the tombs, like a historical tomb raider, to check them out. My guide at the moment, couldn’t almost speak any english. He had a stick that he would point at the old, flaking frescos. I remember most of them; they all had the christian themes and they were all from the Bible and I found them very, very interesting and it was almost unreal to actual be where this ancient culture use to be placed. The guides never went alone with the tourists; they always had to bring a guard as well (so they said). And it was a little bit annoying to have this huge soldier behind my back all the time, even if he seemed kind of nice. Unlike the other guards and soldiers I came in contact with, this guy was unarmed.

Anyway, I would love to see all the historical coptic christian tombs, but they seemed to have a special route for the tourists. I had to beg him to go to some other tombs, and in the beginning he was willing to do so. But I guess he was kind of sleepy and didn’t want to spend all day with me, so he got more and more, well I don’t wan’t to say aggressive, but he tried harder and harder to get me back to the entrance.

So at the end, I just took a lot of pictures on everything historical I saw on my way out. Some of them was kind of good. Here are the pictures, I will probably not upload all of the images on the remains site as well at the moment, but I will do this when the next release / upgrade has been done.

To see more images of ancient Egypt with all the pyramids, fresc writings, sphinxes and other historical stuff, visit www.remains.se . Remember that you can also buy high-res photos from me, you can leave a note under the post if you are interested in this.

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