Old Egypt greets the new Russians
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By Peter Millar Financial Times 15 January 2004
The one thing nobody had told me about the Pyramids is that they hadn't finished them yet. Or that the Russians were now in charge of their completion.
But that is unquestionably what it felt like, climbing up the dusty road to Giza plateau out beyond Cairo's suburbs, which sprawl like an unfinished Soviet housing estate, all dirt and dust and jutting ferro-concrete.
There is an eerie resemblance between perennially unfinished but already decaying ramshackle modern housing and the world's greatest monumental tombs, pillaged relentlessly for building materials for the better part of five millennia. It is hard to imagine either in a finished state.
The evocation of Soviet Russia, however, was not just an indulgence of my imagination: I already had the language ringing in my ears. They may not be helping out with the building any more - since the Aswan Dam was finished over 30 years ago - but they are back with a vengeance: as tourists, businessmen and, of all things, belly dancers.
It is all too easy on a tourist trip to Egypt, humbled by the Pyramids and captivated by Karnak, to have only ancient history in mind, and forget the country's recent and continuing pivotal role in world affairs.
With a teenage son about to start a modern history course at university, I felt obliged to point out that the Mena House Hotel, where we were staying, was the scene of one of the great second world war conferences.
Churchill and Roosevelt met Chiang Kai-Shek there in November 1943 just two days before flying on to see Stalin in Tehran to settle the post-war world order. What I had not expected, any more than they would have, was that today the girl group performing in the disco hailed from St Petersburg. Uncle Joe would not have been amused.
The Egypt of President Hosni Mubarak (for the passage of whose aircraft we mere tourists sweated for 90 minutes in coaches on a runway at Cairo airport) is still directly descended from that of Gamel Abdul Nasser, the Soviet-backed "Arab socialist" of the 1950s.
As a legacy of their British colonial past, the Egyptians may still have a "pound" in their pockets, but Mubarak's "consensus" democracy has more in common with Vladimir Putin's: a case of keeping the lid on the worse alternatives.
But the love-hate relationship to the old imperial power has been matched by a similar attitude towards their former communist allies. They are even learning the language. Having lived as a correspondent in Moscow under the Soviets, I was used to using Russian abroad primarily to dumbfound.
A quick burst of Russian used to be a perfect defensive shield against the street market hassle that still marks the Middle Eastern shopping experience.
Faced with the endless badgering of "where you from?" and "look please, very nice", the reply "Moskva" and "Ya nye ponimayu po-angleesky" used to bring a stunned silence.
Not any more. In Khan al-Khalili, Cairo's great, ancient, warren-like market quarter, my accustomed put-down patter is now met with: "nu smotri, smotri, ochen prekrasno" - you guessed it: "look, please, very nice".
There were, perhaps, advantages. I am convinced my Russian act won us a better price when entering negotiations for my teenage son - "he speak leetle Eenglish" - to buy a hubble-bubble pipe. (The wisdom of buying it all, of course, is quite another matter.)
It was not, however, because of the name - or in spite of it - that there were no Russians out at the Red Pyramid of Dashur, the tomb erected by Sneferu, 60 years before his more famous grandson Khufu's Great Pyramid of Giza.
It is not long since it opened to the public - it stands out in the desert in a zone once occupied by the military. Entering the great corbelled halls inside the Red Pyramid, which takes its name from its colour in the sunset, is a profoundly haunting experience.
Or at least it was until a busload of Japanese tourists arrived and began taking pictures inside the burial chamber on their mobile phones. Happily, there wasn't a signal so they couldn't send them straight away.
The Russians, by and large, don't have much time for the Pyramids, or most of the other antiquities. They come to Egypt for cheap shopping, sun, sea and sex, and their mecca (if you will pardon the sacrilege) is the Red Sea resort of Sharm El-Sheikh.
In what now seems like the ancient world - a mere quarter of a century ago - when I studied Dostoyevsky at university, his depictions of rich, elegant, sophisticated Russians hogging the roulette tables at Baden-Baden seemed almost a fantasy: real Russians were poor, lumpen and so unattractive that the travel writer Jan Morris once wondered how they managed to reproduce at all.
Now the crotchety old babushkas have been replaced by blond babes sprawled on the beach while their beaus in Speedo posing pouches negotiate rates for scuba-diving.
In little more than a decade - just time enough for one set of post-revolutionary adolescents to mature - Russians have not only rediscovered sex, they have remarketed themselves as sex objects, hedonists and high-rollers.
The casinos of "Sharm", as it is universally called, line the highway from the airport like a mini Las Vegas, right down to the neon palm trees in the desert. The Russians are not just the prime punters at the tables, they also provide the entertainment.
Amid the showgirls and cabaret artistes, the can-can dancers with their fishnet stockings and fan tails (and amid the discreetly supervised providers of more supine entertainment) the lingua franca as they head back to hotel rooms at dawn is one that Dostoyevsky would have recognised. Or perhaps I mean Aldous Huxley: "Oh brave new world, that has such people in it!"
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Partner country Egypt at ITB Berlin
Grand opening ceremony on 6 March 2012 – numerous cultural events with typical national attractions at the world’s largest travel trade show – interactive communication via Facebo (24/02/2012)
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