Qena

Qena's position explains it. The Nile makes its closest approach to the Red Sea here, and from the towns of this bend — Qift and Qus as much as Qena itself — desert roads ran east through Wadi Hammamat to the coast, carrying stone from the quarries, gold from the Eastern Desert and, later, trade and pilgrims bound for Arabia. Under the pharaohs and the Ptolemies the religious centre of the district was Dendera, across the river, where the goddess Hathor was worshipped and where the temple that survives was built mainly in the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, its decoration continuing under the Roman emperors into the 2nd century AD.

Christianity took hold early in this part of the valley. Pachomius founded the first communal monasteries near Qena in the 4th century, a form of monastic life that spread from here through the Christian world, and the desert behind the river filled with monasteries and hermitages. Parts of Dendera were reused as a church, and the town continued as a river port.

In the Islamic centuries the city took its present shape around the shrine of Abd al-Rahim al-Qenawi, a scholar from the Maghreb who settled here in the 12th century, became the district's patron saint and gave Qena a pilgrimage identity that it has kept ever since. Medieval Qena and neighbouring Qus handled the Red Sea trade and the pilgrim traffic to Mecca through the port of Quseir. In modern times the railway, the sugar industry, a university and the highway to Safaga made it the administrative and commercial capital of its governorate, while Dendera, a few kilometres away, remained the reason most outsiders come.

Qena is Sa'idi to the core — the Upper Egyptian accent, extended families, formal courtesy, long greetings, and pride in a reputation for toughness and hospitality. Men in galabiyas fill the tea houses after dark, weddings take over whole streets with drumming and lights, and the stick game tahtib, performed as a dance to music, belongs to this region's celebrations.

Religion is the axis of city life. The saint's moulid is the great annual event, drawing crowds from across the region for Sufi chanting, processions and days of camping around the shrine, and smaller moulids and saints' days punctuate the year for both Muslims and the Coptic community, whose monasteries in the surrounding desert go back to the beginnings of communal monastic life in the 4th century. Visitors entering the mosque are expected to dress and behave as worshippers do.

Craft gives the city its other identity. Qena's potters work the local clay into the porous jars, known as qulal and zir, that keep water cool by slow evaporation, along with cooking pots and bread moulds sold in markets far beyond the governorate. The workshops are a working trade rather than a visitor attraction, and their goods turn up on rooftops and in doorways all over Upper Egypt.

The city has a population in the hundreds of thousands and serves a governorate of more than three and a half million, most of them in farming villages. Sugarcane dominates the land, with refineries in the district, and wheat, vegetables and dates fill the rest of the year; pottery, food processing, trade, transport, the university and government employ most of the rest. The port of Safaga and the Red Sea resorts pull workers east, and Cairo and the Gulf pull them further.

The rhythm is the valley's: work from before dawn, a shutdown in the fierce middle of the day, and the streets busy again from late afternoon until well into the night. Microbuses, tuk-tuks and motorbikes move people about, the bridge carries traffic to the west bank and Dendera, and the railway station is the link to Cairo, Luxor and the coast.

Qena's difficulties are those of Upper Egypt as a whole — high youth unemployment, migration, pressure on farmland from building, and inflation that has repeatedly outrun wages. Tourism, despite Dendera being a few minutes away, brings little to the city itself, since most visitors arrive from Luxor in the morning and are gone by lunchtime. Local hopes rest more on the desert road east and the trade it carries than on the temple.

The food here is Upper Egyptian and built on bread and pulses. Ful medames, fava beans cooked slowly overnight and dressed with oil, lemon and cumin, and ta'meya, the fava-bean falafel, are breakfast for most of the city. Bread is the flat aish baladi, with aish shamsi, sun-risen bread, baked in the villages, and fayesh, a dry crunchy rusk, dipped in tea. Koshari — rice, lentils, macaroni, chickpeas, fried onion and spiced tomato sauce — is the cheap filling meal.

Meat is for occasions rather than every day. Grilled kofta and chicken are the treats of the grill houses, and hamam, pigeon stuffed with fireek, green cracked wheat, or rice, is the celebratory dish of the region. Mahshi, vegetables stuffed with herbed rice, and molokhia, the green jute-leaf soup served over rice, are cooked at home, and fatta, layered bread, rice and meat in a garlicky broth, appears at Eid al-Adha and at weddings.

Sugarcane country flavours everything sweet. Cane juice is pressed at roadside stalls, and 'asal iswid, dark molasses boiled from the cane, is beaten with tahini and eaten with bread. Basbousa and konafa, both heavy with syrup, are the usual pastries, dates are sold loose by the kilo, and tea comes strong and very sweet, with karkadeh, the red hibiscus infusion, drunk hot in winter and iced in summer — often from water kept cool in one of the city's own clay jars.