All up Egypt’s Nile, the remains of martyrs are preserved in countless Coptic churches. The bones are picked from old rubble, declared to have belonged to saints who died centuries ago—at the hands of Roman Emperors, Fatimid caliphs or Mamluk emirs.
The monastic cluster at the desert’s edge just opposite Sohag is a prime example. Here, in ancient Akhmim, the story is told that the Christians foresaw their fate through vision. They welcomed it, perhaps drawing from Romans 8:18 that present sufferings can’t compare to future glories. ‘If God be against us,’ the priest Dioscorus and the deacon Asclepius encouraged their flock in Akhmim as the time drew near, ‘then who can be against us?’
Soon amassing against them were the forces of Diocletian, whose soldiers’ arms tired from a slaughter of at least 8,140 Christians in the span of two days. Dioscorus and Asclepius were murdered just after, respectively severed at the neck and the waist. Their remains are mixed among these and countless more martyrs’ relics from a long roll of bloodletting here.
But at the Church of the Martyrs of Faith and Homeland near Middle Egypt’s town of Samalut, the celebrated martyrs were only killed in 2015.
Marched in single file to a Libyan beach and beheaded at the hands of the Islamic State, they were a group of mostly young Egyptian migrant workers from villages right around here. Warned to leave Libya multiple times, all chose to remain, singing hymns in the evenings together, most likely completely aware of the dangers outside their crowded apartment.
Their tattered and discolored jumpsuits fill most of the nave at the Church of the Martyrs, along with the zip tie cords that bound their hands and whatever was found in their pockets. Their icons adorn the back of the sanctuary with gold-leaf halos beneath an image of Christ.
Jarringly, Islamic State fighters’ images and footage features on placards packed along the walls, but it appears from the snippets on the martyrs themselves and their families that not all of the bereaved had felt grief. One called her husband Tawodros a ‘lion,’ saying there was no sadness here: he’s been crowned, they’ve all received crowns. Prior to their youthful deaths, however, there was little of substance recalled of the martyrs’ own words. Some, like George—moved by the Nag Hammadi massacre of 2010—was remembered to have proclaimed to those around him that his dream was to die a martyr.
I felt sick to the stomach as we drove from the church and sped over the Nile, my police escort riding in the back. To both him and the driver, both Coptic, I asked: if given a choice, like those in the church were ostensibly given, between life and death—be marched to your own gruesome death on a beach or return to your families with a little white lie.
The policeman was quick to reply: ‘God knows what’s in your heart.’ Assuming it was even possible to survive in their shoes (they’d kill you regardless, he said), he’d definitely choose to get back to his family. I told him I’d definitely do the same.
I looked to the driver, still in his 20s, about the age of almost all of the victims—or martyrs, now canonized as saints. He was quiet, as though mulling it over, until the policeman stepped out at a checkpoint on the other side of the Nile from Samalut, a short hop from the ancient Church of Jabal al-Tayr.
Smiling, my driver shrugged. ‘Of course,’ he said like it was hardly a question, ‘I’d do what they did.’
