A visit to St Simon the Tanner Church

There was a terrific storm last night. It wasn't forecast - it came out of nowhere! There was thunder, lightning, and torrential rain. By this morning, though, the bad weather had gone and we had sunshine 🌞 and blue skies again.

We met Ray in reception at 10am for our half-day trip to the cave church at El-Mokattam Mountain. Our itinerary was for us to go to the Pharaonic Village, a living museum of Egyptian history. Ray advised us that this is an attraction mainly aimed at children and offered us the chance to go to Saint Simon the Tanner Church instead. We agreed.

There was no mention of the place in my guidebook and I struggled to find much information online, so we went not knowing what to expect. What we found was a huge surprise!

The first shock was driving through the Zabbaleen Village on El-Mokattam Mountain in order to reach the church. This is where the rubbish collectors of Cairo live. The city governor moved them all there in 1969, insisting that all of Cairo's waste was sorted and disposed of in the same place. By 1987, there were 15,000 people living in the village, the vast majority of them Coptic Christian. I didn't get an answer from Ray as to why only 5% of the population are Muslim.

The 'village' today supports a thriving community with shops, businesses, and schools within its confines. The overriding impression, though, is of the rubbish everywhere. The place is dark with a pervasive smell of rotting waste. The roads are not tarmaced. Instead, you appear to be driving on top of a build-up of waste. Ray told us that all the rubbish is sorted. Everything that can be recycled is. Everything else is burned. Through heavy metal doors at street level, we caught glimpses of people (mainly women) up to their waists in rubbish, sorting it into different piles. The rooms were dark and filthy. I can only imagine what it must be like to work in there for hours every day! The whole place was a grim reminder of how some people have to live.

Once through the village, we climbed the mountain to reach the church of the Virgin Mary and St. Simon the Tanner.

Simon the Tanner lived toward the end of the tenth century and, according to local legend, was responsible for the miracle of moving a mountain 300 metres. El-Mokattam is the mountain in question.

In the 1980s, with a growing population of Christian rubbish collectors who had nowhere to worship, it was decided to build a church in one of the caves on the mountain. At the start of the project, the chosen cave had a ceiling height of just one metre. Over five years from 1986 to 1991, stone was removed from the site and a church with 21,000 seats was created!

We had to have one of the three official site guides to explain things to us. Mina was clearly a fervent believer as he told us how some of the sculptures in the church revealed themselves as stone was removed. Relics belonging to Simon the Tanner himself were found on the site and are now displayed in a glass case near the altar.

Whatever you believe, the fact is that there is now a massive, impressive church sitting on top of a mountain dedicated to rubbish!

The site has an evangelical mission, with bible verses carved into to rock in both Arabic and English.

Because the church of St Simon the Tanner is half open to the elements, a further cave church has been created further up the mountain. It is known as 'the winter church' and is dedicated to Saint Mark. This church is totally enclosed and can seat 2,000 people. It came into use in 2001 and has elaborate stone carvings around the walls.

The whole effect of both churches is completely mind-blowing! We have never seen anything like it before. We struggled to make sense of what we were seeing. I don't know if the photos convey the scale of the place. I will attach photos 📸 of the main church to this footprint 👣, and of St Mark's Church to the next one.

After our visit, Ray wanted to take us for another schwarma lunch - no doubt at highly inflated prices! We said we were still full after a big breakfast (true!) and asked to go back to the hotel 😀Read more