Inside the 1,000-Year-Old Gardens of Egypt
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Inside the 1,000-Year-Old Gardens of Egypt

In a remote part of Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, ancient gardens once tended by Bedouin tribes have fallen into disrepair. But after the 2011 revolution tanked the tourist economy, the tribesmen here have begun to return, providing a glimpse of a more...

The Egyptian city of St. Katherine lies at the end of a dusty road that snakes through jagged, rust-colored mountains, weather-beaten palm tree oases, and military checkpoints manned by bored teenagers. The road ends and the town appears, fitting snuggly into the trough of a bare desert mountain range.

Outside, the mountains look bone dry. But inside, channels and crevices lead to emerald pools of water. Fragrant patches of wild mint dust the winding camel trails. A network of black tubes skirt the mountains and valleys, carrying water through the arid landscape. Feral donkeys roam the desert, nibbling at plants and fruit trees. For the Bedouins who live there, the mountains are their livelihoods, a therapeutic landscape, a medicine chest, and a physical remnant of the region's past.

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A boulder bears a pattern of parallel ovals, revealing an old practice in which hopeful couples wanting to get married would etch the outline of their feet into the rock. A pile of stones is arranged with an opening—a trap to catch leopards, none of which have been seen in years.

"We have 33 medicinal herbs—for the stomach, headaches, teeth—cures for all the ailments of a person," says Faraj Mahmoud, who, like many Bedouins, seems to do a bit of everything.

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Walk on any trail and walled enclosures begin to intermittently appear. Some are barren, while others are packed with ruby pomegranates bursting at the seams, waxy almond groves, and shimmering olive trees. These are the Bedouin gardens, a thousand-year-old, self-sustaining farming practice. They've nearly been driven into extinction by tourism and the global food trade, but are now in the midst of resurgence in the Bedouin community of the South Sinai.

Over the past three years, Egypt's international reputation has taken a nosedive. Revolutionary violence coupled with a sporadic terrorism campaign has scared away most of the hundreds of thousands of tourists who used to flock to the country. Sinai, in particular, seems to draw on the collective fears of Western tourists: kidnapping, suicide bombs, gun and drug running, and human trafficking. These things happen throughout the country, of course, but it is in Sinai where these trades converge, and with its proximity to Gaza, it gets more media coverage than other remote areas in the country.

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Fifteen Bedouin tribes call the Sinai home, and in St. Katherine, it is the Gebeleya who run the show. Originally a band of troops contracted to protect the monastery there, the Gebeleya stayed and eventually grew to be the 8,000-odd member group it is today. Bedouin tribes, at large, are separated geographically. Coastal tribes have different practices than desert and mountain tribes, and so on. All have expansive knowledge of the landscape around them; for the Gebeleya (roughly "of the mountain"), it is the high mountains of the South Sinai.

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"My grandfather used to walk from here to the Suez Canal," says Nasser, a mountain guide and occasional farmer at his family garden. "They brought sugarcane from Cairo, traveled to Sharm el Sheikh to the high mountain, where they made big fire on top of mountain." When the Saudis saw the fire on top of the mountain, they knew the sugar was ready. They crossed the canal of Aqaba to the Sinai to trade the sugar for tea, coffee, and spices.

For centuries, this is how business was conducted. "The people from high mountains have connections to the coast who can trade for fish and save it for months and months," says Mohamed Khedr Al Jebaali, a member of Community Foundation for South Sinai, a local NGO working to restore the gardens.

The altitude and spring water allowed them to grow a diverse array of crops: quince, apples, almonds, pomegranates, apricots, figs, grapes, olives, and pears among others. The food that wasn't eaten was dried and saved for the harsh Sinai winter. The fruit, oil, and nuts gave them trading power for things they couldn't grow.

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Around the 1980s, tourists began to wander toward St. Katherine. South Sinai is home to a slew of religious monuments and biblical history, and has a habit of attracting religious and fringe characters. "This is what the monks say: Anyone who drinks from the water here must come back," Mahmoud says.

With tourists came tourist money, and soon Bedouin men began abandoning the gardens for jobs in town, at restaurants, as mountain guides, and in factories.

At the tail end of the Israeli occupation, the Sinai was thrust back toward mainland Egypt. Life was becoming expensive and the hours of hard work and hiking became less appealing with the lure of quick and easy tourist money. "[Now] they forget about how to survive with less," Khedr says. "Before our family didn't have much to live from: They had the gardens, and they can make life very easy and very simple." Foreign vegetables and fruits began to appear in the markets, overshadowing the small quantities of locally grown produce.

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"Young Bedouin now start to forget about the ways in the mountains. They take one route. Most people now work in downtown," Khedr says. In the winter of 2014, four young Egyptians died when a rolling fog surrounded the group on a trail close to St. Katherine. They were with an inexperienced Bedouin guide who left them stranded on the mountain when he went to find help. A storm came through, soaking the hikers. They died from hypothermia, only a few meters from housing shelter.

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Over the years, the gardens became slowly abandoned and the weather began to take its toll. Flooding washed out perimeter walls; the network of thin black pipes that irrigate each garden started to dry and crack.

Then the revolution came in 2011. In Cairo, cameras, protestors, journalists, hired thugs, vendors, armed forces, and police swarmed Tahrir Square and major cities across the country. Egypt began to descend into apparent anarchy, and tourists consequently cancelled their trips, collapsing the country's vital tourism industry.

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The Bedouin tribesmen who had spent their professional lives working in tourism suddenly found themselves out of work. The community began to suffer. Few Bedouin hold college degrees, and the lifestyle isn't conducive to office jobs. Bedouin tribes are cut out of the work in the resorts of Sharm El Sheik, and the tourist money that the droves of British and Russian tourists still bring there. Some simply left the community, while some turned to opium farming. Others turned back to the mountains.

"This is what the Bedouin needs," Khedr says. "Give him a hand, they start to look after their gardens. With a garden, the Bedouin has assets, he has something on his land. Land is always worth something for us." So far, he says, the initiative is working. In one year, a third of the families in St. Katherine began working the gardens again.

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This is especially significant in light of the bad reputation that surrounds Egypt's food culture. The country's staples—tameya (Egyptian falafel), foul, and koshary—are cheap, filling, and produced in mass quantities. Much of Cairo's produce is grown in sewage water from local villages. The rest is imported with government subsidies. Returning to the gardens is, in some ways, a step back into the past. But it's also a step toward a healthier, more sustainable food culture in Egypt.

"You can also have business for the garden. Of course, with the tourists, you can get fast money," Mahmoud says. "But with the garden, you can live from your land for a long, long time."