Along the Nile Valley, the remains of Coptic martyrs are revered in countless churches. The bones, sometimes picked from old rubble, are believed 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 under the command of Arianus (himself later a martyr), whose soldiers’ arms tired from a slaughter of at least 8,140 Christians in the span of three days. Dioscorus and Asclepius were murdered just after, respectively severed at the neck and the waist. It’s believed that their remains are mixed among these and other 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, a short drive from Minya, 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, images of Islamic State fighters and screenshots of their terrible footage features on placards all along the church walls. Then again, scenes of torture and brutal execution are fixtures in places of Christian worship worldwide—particularly in Egypt, where it seems that martyr-mania retains some force of its ancient grip. Thus it also shouldn’t have surprised me that the snippets on the martyrs themselves and their families weren’t soaking with grief. Tawodros’ wife, who called her husband a ‘lion,’ swore there was no sadness there. He’s been crowned, she boasted; they’d all received crowns. Understandably there was quite a bit less celebration of death on display in the martyrs’ own words—but not none. George, for instance, moved by the Nag Hammadi massacre of 2010, was remembered to have proclaimed to those around him that to die a martyr was his dream.
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, leaving out that no lying was required in my case.
I looked to the driver, still in his 20s, about the age of almost all of the victims—officially martyrs, now canonized as saints. He was quiet, maybe 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 young driver shrugged: ‘Of course,’ he said like it was hardly a question. There hadn’t been much to mull over. The choice wasn’t a choice between life or death, but one between affirming or denying one’s faith. ‘I’d do what they did.’
