Tunis Village

Tunis is a young village in a very old landscape. The ridge above the southern shore of Lake Qarun has been the edge of the cultivated Faiyum since antiquity, with the Ptolemaic temple of Qasr Qarun at the far end of the lake and Greco-Roman farming towns buried in the sand around the basin. Until the middle of the 20th century the shore here held no more than a scatter of farming and fishing households on poor land between the water and the desert, without the orchards and canals that made the centre of the oasis prosperous.

Its reputation was made by pottery. The village itself is new, created in the 1960s by the poet Sayed Hegab and the writer Abdou Gobeir; in the 1980s Hegab's wife, the Swiss potter Evelyne Porret, built a house and studio from mud brick and opened a pottery school for local children, teaching the wheel, glazing and firing. Pupils grew up to open their own workshops, their children learned in turn, and ceramics became the village's main trade, with a recognisable style of simple earthenware forms in blue, green and earth glazes.

Artists, writers and architects from Cairo followed, drawn by the quiet and the view, and built or restored houses in mud brick with domed and vaulted rooms in the traditional manner. Guesthouses and small lodges opened for weekend visitors, and an annual ceramics festival began to draw potters from elsewhere in Egypt and abroad. The village today lives from that combination — clay, farming, fishing and visitors — and remains small, with new building restricted by the desert on one side and the lake on the other.

The village is unusual in Egypt: a farming community whose best-known occupation is a craft learned within living memory, and one that women and men both practise. Workshops are family businesses, often run by the children or grandchildren of the first pupils, and the trade is taught at home rather than in a college. Styles are recognisable between families, and pieces are usually signed or stamped.

Alongside that sits ordinary rural Faiyumi life. Households keep goats, poultry and a few fields; fishing families work the lake from small wooden boats; and the rhythm of the week turns on Friday prayers at the village mosque. Hospitality is strong and slightly formal — tea is offered before business, and refusing it outright is awkward — and news travels through the lanes quickly. Dress is conservative, and visitors who cover their shoulders and knees are treated more warmly than those who do not.

The relationship with Cairo is close. Weekend visitors, artists and returning residents bring money, ideas and the occasional friction over land prices and new building. The ceramics festival is the village's public face, turning the lanes into a market and a meeting place for potters from across the country. Away from it the pace is slow: long afternoons, early nights, and the desert beginning a few hundred metres from the last house.

A few thousand people live in Tunis and the settlements immediately around it, and the population rises at weekends and in the winter season when the guesthouses fill. Work divides between the potteries, farming on the narrow strip of cultivated land, fishing on Lake Qarun, and hospitality — cooking, cleaning, driving and guiding for the lodges. Many families do two or three of these at once, and children help in the workshops after school.

The day begins early, with bread baked at home, animals fed and boats out on the lake before the heat. Workshops throw in the morning, glaze in the afternoon and fire in batches when a kiln is full. The village shop, the bakery and the tea stalls on the main lane are the places where people meet; the nearest bank, hospital and secondary schools are in the oasis town about an hour away, so a trip into town is a planned event rather than a casual one.

The concerns here are those of a small rural place with an unusual economy: the price of clay, gas and glaze materials; whether the winter visitor season holds up; the falling level and rising salinity of the lake and what that does to the fish; water for the fields; and the steady sale of village land to outsiders building second homes on the ridge.

Cooking in Tunis is Faiyumi country food, plain and seasonal. Fish from Lake Qarun is the local speciality — bolti, the Nile tilapia, and other freshwater fish grilled over charcoal or fried whole and eaten with rice, tahini, bread and a sharp salad of tomato, cucumber and lime. Duck and chicken are the meats for a celebration or a guest, often roasted with rice, and hamam mahshi, pigeon stuffed with rice or cracked green wheat, is the dish of a real occasion.

Everyday meals are built on bread, pulses and vegetables from the oasis: ful medames, fava beans stewed overnight with oil and cumin; ta'meya, the Egyptian falafel of crushed fava beans; lentil soup; molokhia, the green jute-leaf soup, served with rice; and mahshi, courgettes, peppers, cabbage leaves and vine leaves stuffed with rice and herbs. Feteer meshaltet, the flaky layered pastry, comes from village ovens and is eaten with honey, cream or salty cheese.

The oasis supplies the rest. Olives are cured and pressed for oil, citrus and figs come from the orchards, dates and prickly pears are sold in season, and mish, a sharp cheese aged in brine, and fresh white cheese turn up at every breakfast with eggs and tomato. Tea is drunk very sweet all day, hibiscus tea hot in winter and cold in summer, and guesthouses will usually put on a fresh juice from whatever fruit the market had that morning.