Egypt Makes Plans to Tout Its Role in Christmas Story

In Matariyah, a poor district of greater Cairo that teems with people and animals, traffic and factories, a tiny pocket of ancient serenity can be found hidden behind yellowing walls.

For 28 cents, visitors are admitted to a cloistered garden to gaze at the bent and gnarled remains of an ancient sycamore tree buttressed by huge wooden beams to keep it from collapsing.

This, they are told, is “the Virgin’s Tree,” where Mary and the baby Jesus reportedly sat and rested during their flight into Egypt nearly two millenniums ago. At this time of year especially, Egyptian Christians cherish the memory of their country’s bit part in the Christmas story: how immediately after Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem, the holy family fled to Egypt to avoid death at the hands of King Herod’s soldiers.

Earlier this year, in cooperation with the Coptic Church, the Tourism Ministry began developing what it said will be an authoritative map of sites that Jesus, Mary and Joseph are supposed to have visited on that journey.

“Copts and Christians around the world will be able to go on a pilgrimage to all the places that witnessed Jesus and Mary’s presence,” promised Girgis Daoud Girgis, a professor at Cairo’s Coptic Studies Institute. The idea was to provide a route for the large numbers of tourists and pilgrims expected to visit the Holy Land in 2000, when Christians mark the start of a third millennium of their faith.

The project, however, has been clouded by the massacre of 58 foreign tourists by Muslim extremists in Luxor last month. In the wake of that attack, international visits to Egypt have fallen precipitously, and Egypt’s $3-billion-a-year tourist industry is in a state of collapse. Although work on the map continues, with plans to translate it into seven languages and distribute it to tour operators around the world, no one knows when the tourists will be ready to return.

The route being sketched out with the help of Daoud Girgis shows a journey of nearly 1,000 miles, a virtual Baedeker of Egypt at the beginning of the Christian era.

According to Egyptian tradition, the holy family stayed in Egypt until Jesus was 3 1/2 years old, stopping in more than 20 towns, with the child performing a number of miracles along the way.

Daoud Girgis says the family traveled from Gaza on the Mediterranean, across the Nile Delta, south as far as Asyut in upper Egypt, and then back by way of Maadi and Babylon near modern-day Cairo before setting off across the Sinai wilderness back to Nazareth in northern Israel.

At Bubastis, north of Cairo, it is said that Jesus became thirsty, so a spring appeared for him to take a drink. In Sakha, in the northern delta, a rock is said to bear the footprint of the baby Jesus. And at Jebel El Tair, in upper Egypt, there is a palm print that, tradition says, was left when Jesus held back a rock that was about to fall on Mary and Joseph.

There is no archeological or contemporaneous historical source to place Jesus, Mary and Joseph at any of these spots. But Daoud Girgis said manuscripts indicate that most of the locations have been considered holy by Christians for at least 16 centuries, having been recorded by Theophilus, the 23rd patriarch of the Copts, who reigned in the 4th century. Further proof of their long tradition is that churches and great monasteries were built on the various sites early in the church’s history.

Near the Virgin’s Tree in Matariyah, belief in the family’s odyssey runs deep. “If you have faith, you receive grace,” said Sister Mona, a Roman Catholic nun working at a day-care center here.

Local legend has it that the bread baked on one Matariyah street will not rise properly to this day because Mary once asked for some food there and was refused.

Since the Luxor attack, the garden’s entrance, like most Egyptian tourist sites, has been fortified with soldiers carrying machine guns. Attiat Hanafy, a Muslim covered in a blue veil, paid the entry fee Monday to show the tree to her 14-year-old grandson, Ahmad.

“We don’t see it as much as we should,” she said. “Some people see light when they come here. . . . Some say they have fallen off balconies in this neighborhood and nothing happened to them.”

She lingered for a few minutes, talking animatedly to Ahmad. Then, as she walked away, she described her prayer: “I asked that God guide all of us and that we all love one another, and that there be no enemies among us.”