Modern Luxor. Renovations of Luxor - Articles Egypt Today. Luxor at its best.

TEN YEARS AGO, during a visit to the tomb of Menna in the West Bank of Luxor, Queen Sofía of Spain caught sight of a child spinning wool on the cliff above. Intrigued, she asked permission to have a look around the area.

Peeking into the open door of a house, she saw an old man, Nassif, weaving kilims (handmade Egyptian carpets). The Queen was impressed by the whole atmosphere of Nassif’s home — the charm, the family, the simplicity of the house and studio, the skill and modesty of the weaver and the pictures of saints plastered on the wall. She chatted with the weaver for a while before making her way back down the cliffs. On the way down, she stopped and spoke with the Shahy brothers, who were carving the delicate features of Ramose on a bas-relief, while their mother sat on a dikka (a traditional wooden bench found in rural Egypt) adding beads to multi-colored scarves.

If Sofía ever returns to Gurna, she will probably ask, “Where have all the artisans gone?” As of last month, they are all earmarked for relocation to a new settlement, their houses marked for destruction as part of the Supreme Council for Antiquities’ drive to protect the priceless antiquities of the area. Indeed, one of the dwellings was ripped down by a front-end loader last month as part of a media spectacle to showcase the move of Gurna’s residents to a new “model” community.

Sofía is a former pupil and current patron of the English Girls College in Alexandria, and at one of our school events, I gave her a book on pioneer painter Mohamed Nagui, whose museum is on the road to Alexandria. It was Nagui who suggested to the Minister of Culture the idea of creating of the Marsam Art Center in Gurna. Promising graduates of the School of Fine Arts were awarded two-year scholarships to paint, time described as “the best years of our lives” by Rifaat Ahmed. The sentiment is shared by all of our well-known artists including Gazbia Sirry, Salah Taher, Mohamed Nagui and Mustafa el Razzaz.

In the late 1940s, many were fortunate enough to listen to discussions on art and music between friends — and cultural icons — Hamed Said (the noted artist) and architect Hassan Fathy, who was building the village of New Gurna. Today, many years after this program of symposia ceased (replaced by short-term programs for youth of many backgrounds), foreign and Egyptian artists, photographers, writers and lovers of Egypt pour in from all over the world to the hotel of Sheikh Ali Abdel Rasoul while exhibitions are still held at the Marsam center.

These visitors sit with the people of Gurna —farmers, teachers, artisans and guides — talking over endless glasses of tea within view of the colossi of Memnon and the Tombs of the Nobles. The palm trees in the hotel’s courtyard are domed by clear starry skies, filling all who sit there with a sense of camaraderie and wonder at the beauty of this ethereal panorama.

British artist Euphemia MacTavish says that if the villages are gone, “the whole feeling of continuity would be gone the presence of the people, the aristocrats, the reminder of an ancient culture we learn about ourselves by studying the people, the past, the present and the future in one place which is a conglomerate of our lives.”

Ursula Fleishmann, a photographer who has held exhibitions dealing with the people and landscape of Gurna in Berlin, Paris, Alexandria and at the Marsam in Gurna — an artist who has been coming to Luxor’s West Bank for ten years — says, “I will not return if they tear down the village.”

Caroline Simpson has spent years documenting the history of Gurna and raised funds through a British charity to set up a permanent exhibition with never-before-published 1826 drawings by Robert Hay, copies of which were donated by the British Library. Will Simpson ever set foot again in Luxor if this exhibition, located in one of the premises near the tomb of Ramose, is demolished?

These are the people who genuinely love Egypt, people who come back year after year when our six-day tourists have flown away.

Will they return to a Luxor whose charming turn-of-the-twentieth-century stucco ornamentation is torn down to widen the streets? Will they want to stare at a mountain devoid of the energy of its vibrant people carrying on with their daily tasks of painting, sculpting, weaving, baking shami bread and leading their donkeys down to the fields, just like in the murals of the Tombs of the Nobles? Will the hundreds of Egyptian and foreign artists, including foreign archeologists, continue to find inspiration in the bare mountains?

Contrary to the belief that foreign archeologists think the villages should go, many are saddened and call instead for solutions to the water problem or damage control. Several have recently held exhibitions of their sketches and paintings of the villages.

As for the demolition of over 1,000 houses, unique examples of beautiful vernacular architecture, one visitor asked what will be done to get rid of the tons of debris? Another tourist visiting the Ramesseum was horrified to see that some of the rubble from a house demolished by a bulldozer had inadvertently fallen into a tomb below. Will even the tourists come when on windy days all of the dust and tons of mud and debris from the demolished houses swirls into the tombs of the Nobles to settle on the painted and carved walls?

Are we killing the goose that lays the golden eggs? et

Nawal Hassan is the founder and director of the Center for Egyptian Civilization Studies. She can be reached at egyptciv@ internetegypt.