Siwa Oasis

Siwa has been inhabited for thousands of years, watered by natural springs in a depression that reaches nineteen metres below sea level and holds some two hundred springs. Its fame in the ancient world came from the oracle of Amun at Aghurmi, consulted by Greeks as well as Egyptians. Herodotus recorded that an army sent by Cambyses II around 525 BC to subdue the oracle vanished in a sandstorm, and Alexander the Great crossed the desert during his months in Egypt to question the oracle, which pronounced him a son of Amun. Under the Ptolemies and Rome the oasis grew dates, olives and grain, and its dead were buried in the rock tombs of Gebel al-Mawta.

Christianity and then Islam reached Siwa, but its isolation kept it half independent. Raiding forced the population into a single fortified town: Shali was built in the Middle Ages, tight on its rock in kershif, blocks of salt-laden mud and palm logs that set hard, with lanes so narrow that loaded donkeys could barely pass. For centuries the oasis was governed by its own councils of elders and defended by its own rules, trading dates for grain with the coast and with Libya.

Muhammad Ali brought Siwa under Cairo's control in 1820 after several campaigns. During the Second World War the oasis sat behind the desert front, and both sides passed through it. Heavy rain in 1926 dissolved much of Shali and drove families to build new houses on the flat ground below, leaving the old town to erode into the shape seen today. A paved road to Marsa Matruh arrived only in the 1980s, and with it came electricity, television, state schools and, gradually, tourism.

Siwa is Berber, not Arab, in its oldest identity. Its people speak Siwi, the easternmost surviving Berber language, alongside Arabic, and keep customs that have no parallel in the Nile Valley. Society is organised by families and by the families, and councils of elders still settle many matters locally.

Craft carries much of the culture. Siwan embroidery, worked in silk on black cotton in dense geometric patterns, and heavy silver jewellery, especially the large disc a girl wore until she gave it up on her wedding day, are distinctive to the oasis, and baskets of palm fibre banded with wool are made in the gardens. Weddings run for days, with drumming, processions and communal cooking, and songs in Siwi are passed on within families.

The Siyaha, held at Gebel Dakrur each autumn after the date harvest, is the oasis's own festival: three lunar days of shared meals on the hill at which disagreements are settled and peace is renewed between families, honouring the town's patron saint Sidi Sulayman, and ending in a march to Sidi Sulayman square in the centre of Siwa. Religion is Sunni Islam, observed strictly, and social rules are firm. Women are largely absent from public space, unmarried couples should behave discreetly, dress is expected to be modest for everyone including at the springs, and photographing Siwan women is not acceptable. Visitors who respect these limits find the oasis welcoming and unhurried.

About twenty-five thousand people live in Siwa town and the villages scattered across the depression, a small population spread over a wide green floor of gardens between salt flats and desert. Life turns on water and on the two crops it supports: dates, which Siwa grows in enormous quantity and sells across Egypt, and olives, pressed here into oil. Springs and wells feed the gardens through old channels, and the drainage that carries salty water away to the lakes is a constant concern, since rising salinity and falling groundwater threaten the palms.

Around farming sit small-scale trade, handicrafts, government jobs and tourism, which has grown since the road was paved and which supports guesthouses, mud-brick lodges, drivers and desert guides. The oasis was one of the first places in Egypt where eco-lodges built of kershef found an international audience, and craft cooperatives sell embroidery and basketwork.

The day is shaped by heat: early mornings in the gardens, a long pause through the afternoon, and evenings in the market square, where men sit over tea while donkey carts and motorbikes come and go. Isolation is felt in everything from the price of goods trucked in from the coast to the shortage of specialist medical care and the number of young people who leave for Marsa Matruh and Alexandria. Border security is a permanent presence, with checkpoints on the only paved road out.

Siwan cooking is oasis cooking, built on what the gardens give. Dates appear at every stage of ripeness, eaten fresh in late summer, dried for the rest of the year, stuffed with almonds, pressed into paste or boiled down into syrup, and Siwan olives and the oil pressed from them go into nearly every meal. Bread is baked flat in clay ovens or in the embers, and dried on racks in the sun.

The dish visitors meet most often is meat and vegetables slow-cooked in a covered clay pot in a pit or an oven, usually lamb, goat or chicken with onions, tomatoes, potatoes and oasis herbs, served with rice or bread. Lentil soup, molokhia, stuffed vegetables, and salads of tomato, cucumber and olives fill out the table, and the wider Egyptian staples of ful medames and ta'meya are eaten at breakfast here as everywhere else in the country.

Tea is the centre of hospitality. It is served very sweet in small glasses, often green and with mint, and guests are offered several rounds in sequence; refusing the first is unusual. Hibiscus, or karkadeh, is drunk chilled in the heat. Honey from the gardens, dried figs and dates are the usual sweet, and alcohol has no place in Siwan social life.