Faiyum

The depression was a marshy lake basin fed by a side channel of the Nile until the kings of the 12th Dynasty, around 1900 BC, turned it into one of the ancient world's great water projects: they deepened the channel, built regulators at the entrance near Lahun and used the basin as a reservoir, draining part of it for farmland. Amenemhat III, the king most associated with the work, built his pyramid at Hawara beside an immense columned building that Herodotus and Strabo described as the Labyrinth and rated above the pyramids. The town at the centre of the basin was Shedet, called Crocodilopolis by the Greeks, where live crocodiles sacred to the god Sobek were kept and fed.

Under the Ptolemies the basin was drained further and settled with Greek-speaking soldiers and farmers, and new towns such as Karanis, Medinet Madi and Dionysias appeared around its edge. Roman Faiyum grew wheat, olives and wine for the empire, and its dry sand preserved two remarkable things: tens of thousands of documents on papyrus, which describe daily life in more detail than almost anywhere else in the ancient world, and the painted mummy portraits, lifelike panels of wax and pigment fixed over the faces of the dead.

The Arab conquest brought the name Fayyum, and the town remained a provincial centre through the Islamic centuries, its irrigation maintained and its waterwheels turning. Ottoman and 19th-century Faiyum traded in grain, cotton and fruit. In the 20th century the basin was farmed more intensively, drainage water from the fields created the artificial lakes of Wadi El Rayan, and Lake Qarun grew saltier as a result. The town itself has since spread well beyond its canals.

The Faiyum is rural Middle Egypt: an agricultural province with a strong sense of its own identity, a slower pace than the capital two hours away, and a way of speaking that Cairenes recognise at once. Family and land shape social life, and the working week follows the irrigation rotation and the market days of the surrounding villages as much as the calendar.

Religious observance is visible and unhurried. Mosques fill for Friday prayers and the streets empty for an hour; moulids at local shrines bring processions, Sufi chanting and fairground stalls; and Coptic families, present here since the early centuries of Christianity, keep their own feasts, with monasteries in the desert nearby. Ramadan reorganises the day completely, and the tables set out in the streets for the fast-breaking meal are a point of pride.

Craft traditions are strong for a province of this size. The best known is the pottery of Tunis village on the lake, taught there since the 1980s and now supporting its workshops and galleries; basketry from lake reeds, weaving and palm-frond work continue in the villages. Pigeon towers, waterwheels and dovecotes are as much a part of the landscape as the orchards. Visitors are still unusual enough to draw friendly curiosity, and a stranger asking directions is likely to be walked to the door rather than pointed towards it.

Several hundred thousand people live in the town and about four million in the wider governorate, one of the most densely farmed parts of Egypt. Most households depend directly or indirectly on the land: citrus, olives, figs, mangoes, dates, wheat, clover and vegetables, with poultry, sheep and buffalo in most villages, and fishing on Lake Qarun and the reserve lakes. Produce leaves for Cairo's markets every night.

The town provides what the countryside needs — the market, the courts and offices, hospitals, schools and a university — along with workshops, brick kilns and small food industries. Work is often informal and seasonal, wages are low, and many young people commute to Cairo or migrate to the Gulf, sending money home. Reclaimed desert land on the fringes has been planted with new orchards, and tourism around the lake and the reserves provides a small but growing number of jobs.

The rhythm of the day starts before dawn with the call to prayer and the first irrigation turns, quietens in the heat of the afternoon and revives in the evening, when the cafés along the canal fill with men drinking tea and playing dominoes. Water is the constant subject: how much reaches the tail of each canal, how salty the lake has become, and how the drainage system copes as the population grows.

Faiyum eats from its own fields and its lake. Bolti, the Nile tilapia, and other freshwater fish from Lake Qarun are grilled over charcoal or fried whole and eaten with rice, tahini, bread and a salad of tomato, cucumber and lime; the fish restaurants along the southern shore are the province's best-known kitchens. Rural cooking is otherwise built on bread, pulses and vegetables: ful medames, ta'meya made from crushed fava beans, lentil soup, and mahshi, vegetables and vine leaves stuffed with rice and herbs.

Village ovens bake feteer meshaltet, the flaky layered pastry eaten with honey, cream or salty cheese, and heavy discs of whole-grain baladi bread. Duck, chicken and pigeon are the festive meats, roast pigeon stuffed with rice or cracked green wheat being a special-occasion dish fed by the dovecotes in the fields. Mish, a sharp aged cheese matured in brine, and fresh white cheese appear at breakfast in most houses.

The orchards define the sweet side of the table. Oranges, mandarins, figs, guava, grapes, dates and mangoes are eaten fresh and pressed into juice, olives are cured and pressed for oil, and prickly pears are sold from barrows in late summer. Tea is drunk very sweet throughout the day, hibiscus tea hot in winter and iced in summer, and the coffee houses along the canal serve thick coffee and shisha late into the night.