Close Enough to Touch

Friday mornings in Cairo are truly blissful - as it is the holy day for Muslims, few people are on the roads and traffic (and thus honking) is at a minimum, and I have no class or work, so I can wake up leisurely late in the morning to the sound of the call to prayer. Though I eventually had to get down to laundry and homework (like any weekend day in college), in the afternoon I set off with the group to explore Coptic Cairo. As I said earlier, Copts are Christian Egyptians, and the majority of churches and Christian cemeteries are located in a particular part of town. We spent the afternoon walking around the shops and churches, particularly that of St. George, where people leave prayers and charity money in his crypt. The most interesting part of the trip to me, however, was the Coptic museum. While the ruins and artifacts were beautiful, the part of the museum that caught my attention was the structure of the museum itself. The building was overwhelmed with artifacts - pieces of paintings, pieces of tapestries, the capitals of columns, old books, pipes, lanterns, everything. A large portion of this historical stuff wasn't even encased behind glass or behind a velvet rope... it was just chilling in the middle of a big room. This utterly blew my mind - what was stopping me from touching this really ancient piece of stonework: absolutely nothing. I'm sure if someone saw me do it, I would have gotten in trouble, but that would have been after the fact. It would have been really easy to reach out and poke a Corinthian style column from the early monastic period. (And no, I didn't touch anything... let's be serious: I'm kind of a goody two-shoes when it comes to museum etiquette). Aside from the ease of touching things in the museum, there was little to no description of anything in the rooms. Not only were the plaques on individual pieces small and not very helpful, there were little to no signs of an overlapping theme for the room or an explanation of Coptic history. Of the few signs I saw, about half of them had exactly the same blurb (in English, Arabic, and French) about Coptic textile-production (mildly fascinating the first time, barely attention-grabbing the second, and it kept going down hill). As we left, thoroughly overwhelmed by the shear volume of stuff in the museum, we were chased down by a security guard who insisted on giving us a tour of one last room and then reminded us about 10 times that we had to tip security on our way out. To put the icing on the cake, later in the day I met some friends of our program director, one of whom knows an Egyptologist and informed me that all of the plaques in the Coptic museum are blatantly historically incorrect. Typical Cairo - so much to offer that in the end you wind up a bit confused.