Hundreds of people in colorful white robes festively walk the avenue flanked by illuminated human sphinxes and stone rams.
Luxor, in Upper Egypt, is perhaps the largest archaeological treasure chamber. With dances and fireworks, the Avenue of the Sphinxes was recently reopened there, through which this country celebrates its ancient history and also seeks to make it clear that it is a current vacation destination, beyond the pandemic.
Spotlights bathe the temple walls an orange-red, statues of Ramses II look even more powerful and mysterious than in daylight.
Hundreds of people dressed in colorful white robes festively walk through the avenue flanked by human sphinxes and illuminated stone rams. The dancers move to the rhythm of movie music.
Egypt invited this grand reopening of the archaeological boulevard in the southern city of Luxor, with the goal of showing itself as a nation cradle of civilization and a tourist destination despite the coronavirus.
The dancers, actors, musicians and technicians provided everything for the television show. The choreography was introduced along the paths of the temples, through the sparkling clean streets, by illuminated carriages, stages of floating boats and even by the sky lit by fireworks.
President Abdel Fatah al Sisi, along with his wife Intisar, was sitting in the audience and smiling. Egypt’s Minister of Tourism and Antiquities, Khaled el-Anany, said: “Our monuments are incomparable.”
The message is clear: treasures shine, antiquity lives, the gates of Egypt are wide open to visitors from all over the world.
This nation is highly dependent on income from tourism, so it suffered heavily from the already soon two-year pandemic. Now a new wave of visitors is expected to experience the old splendor anew.
Luxor, on the right bank of the Nile, built on the territory of the ancient city of Thebes, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a long-standing tourist attraction.
The temple, built around 1380 in honor of the god Amun, is one of the best-preserved buildings from Egyptian antiquity.
On the left side of the Nile you can see the Valley of the Kings between dusty rocks. British archaeologist Howard Carter discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb there 100 years ago and, so to speak, the crown jewels of Egyptology.
Also Luxor itself, where the well-being of many families depends on tourism, was strongly affected by the pandemic. Even in late summer, felucca captains waited for customers on the Nile promenade, while empty carriages with their horses were parked downtown.
And in the market for goldsmiths, spices and other souvenirs, merchants tried to attract the few tourists of the day to their shops with an extra slice of charm.
But, little by little, the flows of tourists from destinations as dissimilar as Kiev, Stuttgart and Colorado are returning, vaccinated and tested. Currently, more than 500,000 foreign visitors are arriving per month to the North African country.
Thus, hopes are raised that the maximum mark so far registered of 13.3 million in the year 2019. During the months of the coronavirus pandemic, archaeologists announced a series of great discoveries: dozens of wooden sarcophagi, new burial chambers, a 5,000-year-old brewery and even a lost city.
At the same time, museums seem to sprout from the ground, similar to the new cities and settlements that Al Sisi has built around the country. Museums are opening in Cairo, in rural areas, for the first time also in Hurghada and Sharm el Sheikh, and even the airport in the Egyptian capital now has one.
“The heritage and cultural value of a country is measured in the quality and number of its museums”, considered Minister El-Anany in statements to dpa last June.
Many accolades are received, for example, by the new National Museum of Egyptian Civilization (NMEC) in Cairo, which begins its account 35,000 years ago and leads through the history of pharaohs, Greeks, Romans and the Islam to modernity.
And the Great Egyptian Museum (GEM), With its 100,000 artifacts it will have the largest archaeological collection in the world, it is still being built, since 2005. The delayed work led to inauguration dates announced and postponed time and time again. Now, the one mentioned is the boreal summer of 2022.
And Luxor currently offers one more attraction. The 2,700-meter avenue, which features more than 1,300 different and well-maintained sphinxes, it can become a new central hub for tourists.
For decades it remained abandoned. In ancient Thebes the procession was held there for the Feast of Opet, a celebration of the annual flood of the Nile, which renewed the land and made it fertile again.
A spectacle very similar to that of the reopening of the Avenue of the Sphinxes took place last April in Cairo, when the mummies of 22 pharaohs were transferred with great pomp to the NMEC.
Nowadays, in Luxor all hotel rooms are booked for the first time in ten years for the next six weeks, according to the president of the city council, Tarik Lutfi.
In one of the short films prepared for the show, you can see how researchers quickly move their brushes to free up dirt and reveal what will be the next archaeological sensation. (I)
Paul is a talented author and journalist with a passion for entertainment and general news. He currently works as a writer at the 247 News Agency, where he has established herself as a respected voice in the industry.
