There are decisions that trigger unexpected caroms. A clear example occurred in the mid-20th century, when the political decision to build a hydraulic dam in Egypt resulted in Poland discovering and hoarding the largest and most valuable European collection of art from the Christian period in Nubia, a territory between southern Egypt and northern sudan. The set, made up of 67 wall paintings from the 8th to 14th centuries, has been on display since 1972 at the Kazimierz Michalowski Faras Gallery, a space of the National Museum in Warsaw.
There were four archaeological campaigns that brought the images to light. They were found in a buried cathedral in the small Sudanese town of Faras (formerly Para, or Pachoras), the administrative capital and episcopal seat of the medieval African kingdom of Nobatia in northern Nubia. Warsaw is fond of them, for, together with their sisters preserved in Khartoum, they represent the best known examples of the exquisite art produced by the Christian Nubians of the Middle Ages.
But these iconographic jewels were in serious danger of disappearing unnoticed underwater before re-emerging from the land. How they escaped that muddy fate and today shine in the Polish capital was a separate chapter in the Cold War, a hopeful milestone for cooperation in the midst of a bipolar world.
In the 1950s, Colonel Nasser, Egyptian leader after the overthrow of the pro-British King Farouk I, decided to build a dam to control the flow of the Nile. That engineering work would be a key piece in his strategy to modernize and make the Nile more autonomous. country.
But the dam, projected off Aswan, threatened Egyptian heritage and that of the neighboring state upriver, Sudan. Not in vain, the dam would create an immense lake (about 550 km long by 220 wide) between the first cataract of the Nile and the so-called Dal, to the south of the second. This area coincided with the historical region of Lower Nubia, in the words of Unesco, “an area of ??extreme cultural wealth.”
Some twenty ancient temples stand out among its vestiges –such as that of Ramses II in Abu Simbel–, as well as numerous tombs and fortresses. This is not to mention sites that were little explored at the time, but promising. Faras, located just after crossing the Egyptian border towards Sudan, was one of the first to be flooded, as it was found at a low altitude.
For all these reasons, in 1959, Unesco made a global appeal to quickly rescue these treasures. The so-called Nubian campaign became a memorable success. It is considered the largest archaeological effort coordinated by Unesco in the entire 20th century.
Forty missions were mobilized, coming from the five continents and made up of archaeologists, scientists and technicians from various disciplines. The bulk of the equipment was operational from 1960 to 1967, although the campaign lasted until 1980.
Fifty countries contributed half of the 80 million dollars (about 483 million euros today) needed to meet the expenses. The other 50% was assumed by the Egyptian and Sudanese governments, which, to encourage international participation, offered to donate half of the findings to collaborating countries.
Twenty-two monuments and architectural complexes were dismantled and installed in higher places. Most stayed in the region; others moved to remote sites, such as the temple of Debod, reopened in 1972 in Madrid. But much more was excavated and recorded, hundreds of sites with thousands of relics. The most striking among those that appeared by surprise were the wall paintings of Faras. Its discovery was made by the Polish mission, one of the first to respond to UNESCO’s call.
Directed by the Egyptologist Kazimierz Michalowski, this director of the National Museum of Warsaw and university professor chose Faras as his work camp because the small Sudanese settlement “was full of promise”, he explained in the Unesco Courier of December 1964. And it is that The city, before rising as the capital of the medieval kingdom of Nobatia (between the first and third cataracts of the Nile), had hosted a temple of the Egyptian New Kingdom (c. 1550-c. 1070 BC) and Meroitic constructions (ss. V-IV a. C.).
Indeed, since the 19th century, Faras had provided British and American expeditions with remains from these and other periods. But nothing allowed us to predict the vestiges recovered by the Polish mission from 1961 to 1964. As Professor Michalowski would explain: “We have discovered, buried under the sands, an entire basilica, abandoned in the 12th century, when the castle fell definitively into the hands of the Arabs. northern Nubia.
It was a building made of stone and red brick, that is, more resistant than other contemporaries of the Nile. This basilica dated from the 7th century and had five naves, a “rare occurrence in Nubia, where the churches […] were divided only into three”. As he progressed in the investigation, the archaeologist understood the reason for these higher dimensions. It was a cathedral. It had been the seat of an eparch (bishop of the Eastern Church), from when Faras became an important Christian cultural center in Nubia under the direct influence of Byzantium.
Michalowski glimpsed from the beginning the relevance of parietal images. “Between 1962 and 1963 – he explained – we dismantled the building in stages, and very recently – he specified in 1964 – we brought to light a set of frescoes and wall paintings that will make an era in the history of Byzantine art”.
From that moment on, a laborious operation was launched to extract the paintings and move them out of the floodable area. A delicate task that had to be carried out against the clock: in a few months, the Nile would cover the deposit. That is why Michalowski urgently summoned all available archaeologists in Poland to assist him.
The company turned out great. The finds were distributed between the national museums of Warsaw and Khartoum, the latter created expressly for this purpose. In 1972, the European art gallery presented its jewels to the public in the so-called Faras Gallery, to which pieces from other Nubian excavations would be added.
The rediscovery of Faras brought to light the sophistication achieved by forgotten kingdoms of the medieval Nile, such as the Christians of Nobatia, Makuria and Alodia. In line with this, the findings also founded the birth of an entire branch of archaeology, nubiology.
The decoration of the Faras cathedral was surprising. The walls contained the names of twenty-seven bishops, as well as their portraits, “painted with astonishing […] realism,” said Professor Michalowski. Later, in a nearby cemetery, the skeletons of the prelates were found. An anthropological examination confirmed the “perfect similarity between the facial structure of the portraits and the skulls.”
The paintings also present various scenes from the Bible and different religious figures; among them, the Virgin, the archangel Saint Michael and the Apostles. The image of Santa Ana would be the one that would be reproduced the most in advertising products, such as posters, stamps and mugs. No wonder she was nicknamed Faras’ Mona Lisa.
As described by Unesco, “unlike the Coptic art of Egypt, that of Christian Nubia is closely linked […] to Byzantine art”. However, it has “an originality, picturesqueness and ingenuity” that “give Faras’s works a unique place in the iconography of Christianity.”
Sudan retained 37 frescoes, including the largest: a Nativity 7 meters high by 4 meters wide. The rest traveled to Poland, as well as ceramics, bronze artifacts, stone sculptures, architectural decorative elements, and textile fragments recovered in the 1960s.
The Faras Gallery recreates the original context of the paintings. One of the rooms where these are exhibited stages the interior of the cathedral, and a three-dimensional projector shows the images (including those kept in Khartoum) in the place they occupied.
This text is part of an article published in number 560 of the Historia y Vida magazine. Do you have something to contribute? Write to us at redaccionhyv@historiayvida.com.
