Egypt Festivals and Celebrations

Egypt keeps three calendars at once, and they do not line up. The Islamic lunar year moves against the solar one, the Coptic church runs its own, and one of the oldest festivals in the country predates both by a very long way.

Ramadan and the Eids

Ramadan is the month of daylight fasting and it changes the country completely. Offices and sites shorten their hours, streets are quiet in the afternoon, and then at sunset everything opens at once: tables in the street, lanterns strung between buildings, and a sociability that runs most of the night.

Visiting during it is a trade. Practicalities are harder and the atmosphere is extraordinary. Eid al-Fitr closes the month with several days of holiday, and Eid al-Adha follows later in the year. Because the lunar year is shorter, all of these move earlier by roughly eleven days each year, so check against the calendar rather than assuming.

The Coptic calendar

Coptic Christmas falls on the seventh of January and is a public holiday. Coptic Easter moves, and the Monday after it is Sham el-Nessim.

Sham el-Nessim is the interesting one. It is a spring festival with pharaonic roots, older than either Christianity or Islam in Egypt, and it is kept by essentially everybody regardless of religion: families go outdoors and eat salted fish, spring onions and colored eggs. A country that has continued one festival across three religions is telling you something about itself.

Moulids, and the sun at Abu Simbel

Moulids are saints days, celebrated at shrines with processions, music, food and enormous crowds, in both the Muslim and Coptic traditions. They are intense, local and not staged for visitors, and going to one with somebody who knows it is a different experience from wandering in.

Twice a year, on the twenty second of February and the twenty second of October, the rising sun reaches down the length of the Great Temple at Abu Simbel and lights the statues in the sanctuary at the back. It draws a crowd well before dawn. That alignment survived the temple being cut up and moved to higher ground, which is its own kind of achievement.