THE FARAS GALLERY. TREASURES FROM THE FLOODED DESERT

Twenty temples from the times of the Egyptian pharaohs and the religious complex on the holy island of Philae were threatened. Countless cemeteries, settlements, tombs and fortresses faced annihilation under the waters of the artificial lake.

Salvation of at least a part of the most valuable monuments became a top priority not only for Egyptian and Sudanese governments, but also for the international world of archaeology. It was then that UNESCO addressed an international appeal to archaeologists to help to salvage the heritage of ancient cultures within Lower Nubia on the territories of Egypt and Sudan. This extraordinary enterprise would demand immense efforts on the part of numerous international organisations, research teams, scientists and experts in related fields. In exchange for the participation in the ‘Nubian Campaign’, the governments of Egypt and Sudan offered one half of future finds to the participating countries.

The area around Faras had attracted explorers’ attention since the nineteenth century AD. European travellers would arrive to draw and describe ancient ruins, and copy hieroglyphic inscriptions and images from stone blocks scattered randomly around the town and surrounding area.

Significant progress in historical research of Faras was made in the twentieth century. The British excavated and documented a considerable number of remains from the times of Egyptian pharaohs and Meroitic rulers, but they still failed to find the original Egyptian temple.

They also examined widespread Meroitic cemeteries near Faras with numerous tombs giving evidence of the wealth of Faras’ inhabitants at the time, as well as remains of several medieval churches, a hermit’s grotto and ruins of a large building from the Meroitic period which had been rebuilt during Christian times – assumed to be the palace of the royal governor. Finally, the British team confirmed that the 16 metre high mound in the centre of Faras dating from the Meroitic period contained ruins of a building but did not examine it.

The true breakthrough came with the salvage excavations of the Polish team led by Professor Kazimierz Michałowski in the years 1961–64.

During four excavation seasons, Polish archaeologists discovered that the artificial hill, the so-called Great Kom, contained not an ancient Egyptian temple, but the wonderfully preserved ruins of a medieval episcopal cathedral.

The walls of the Faras (Pakhoras) eighth-century AD cathedral were covered with religious depictions painted during 700 years of continuous functioning of the church, that is, until the fourteenth century AD. Those paintings are priceless testimony of the rich culture of medieval Nubia, preserved for posterity, firing the imagination and research interests of several generations of researchers and art lovers.

Faras Cathedral was attended by the faithful from the eighth through the fourteenth century AD. During that period it was refurbished several times. It was a building in a square plan whose sides measured about twenty four metres, with the apse oriented eastwards. The church was located among other buildings in town.

Its walls, preserved as high as to the level of the base of the vault in some places, were constructed in blocks of grey sandstone in the bottom part, and in fired red clay brick in the upper part. There were two entrances: northern and southern. In the middle of the western facade the outline of a third entrance was visible, but the doorway was walled over for unknown reasons.

The church was divided into three parts: chancel, aisles and narthex. The chancel was closed with a semicircular apse housing a tiered platform for the priests, in front of which a mortared altar was placed. A baptistery, with a baptismal font later concealed under the floor, was adjacent to the chancel from the south. On the southern side, a sacristy was located, furnished with wall recesses used to store liturgical books and equipment.

Massive pillars divided the central part of the church into three aisles: the higher central nave and shorter side aisles, which had adjacent chapels on the north and the south side. Wide pilasters supported arches of the vaults and divided the aisles into five articulate bays. The elongated middle bays formed a kind of a transept giving the interior a cruciform shape.

The group of the so-called Faras frescoes (technically, these are not frescoes, but tempera on dry mud plaster), amounting to over 150 paintings, proved to be one of the most exciting discoveries of the Nubian Campaign.

Thanks to the efforts of conservators from the National Museum in Warsaw, backed up by the rest of the team, the majority of the paintings were successfully detached from the walls of Faras Cathedral. Also, many pieces of architectural decoration and others priceless artefacts from the town’s area were salvaged.

The conservators cut off the slices of safeguarded plaster from the wall using knives and saws on long handles. The pieces were then carefully transported onto the screens. The next phase was to remove excess plaster from the reverse side of the paintings and to strengthen them with new plaster, wire and aluminium net, after which the paintings were wrapped up in cotton blankets and packed into wooden boxes.

In accordance with the previous agreement between Poland and Sudan, the findings were divided between the two countries.

The National Museum in Warsaw received 67 paintings, a group of stone elements from the architectural decoration of the cathedral and other churches and buildings in Faras, epitaphs of local bishops and priests, as well as products of Nubian craftsmen, including a large group of painted pottery from local works.

The remaining monuments from this site found their way to the Sudan National Museum in Khartoum.

The Nubian Campaign of 1960–70 led to a massive breakthrough in research on ancient and medieval Nubia. There were invaluable sites which could not be salvaged; yet many ancient temples have been discovered and examined, as well as more than 50 medieval churches in larger towns, like Qasr Ibrim, Faras, or Jebel Adda. A considerable number of monuments of ancient cultures developing within the Nile Valley since prehistoric times has been saved from irreversable destruction.

The Faras artefacts formed the nucleus of the Nubian collection of the National Museum in Warsaw. They were later followed by findings from the excavations run by Polish archaeologists since 1965 until present day at Old Dongola, the capital of the medieval kingdom of Makuria. In 2010, the Museum acquired a considerable body of artefacts from the salvage excavations carried out in the area of the Fourth Cataract. Mainly tomb deposits – pottery, decorative items and elements of weaponry from the Post-Meroitic period (the fourth through sixth century AD) and the early Christian period – both of which were scarcely represented in the Museum’s collections. The Nubian collection in Warsaw remains the largest and the most valuable gathering of medieval Nubian artefacts in Europe.

The north nave reveals the exquisite image of St. Anne. Two chapels on the south end of the church hold the portrait of the Hermit Ammonios and images of the Nubian bishops Petros and Marianos. Also replicated are the cathedral’s narthex, where the majority of the Museum’s collection was discovered. The western part of the church contained this. The nartex was a spacious hall where penitent sinners gathered.

When the main entrance to the cathedral in the western facade was walled over, before AD 923, the interior then had a flat recess, in the narthex. After being plastered, it was decorated with a depiction of the enthroned Virgin Mary with Child, and archangels Michael and Gabriel painted on the sides. Later on, the walls were plastered anew two times, and each time a new composition was painted.

In the twelfth century AD a portrait of the Virgin Mary wearing a crown and imperial coat, standing with The Child in Her arms against the dark blue night sky, was painted in the recess. The Mother of God holds a narrow kerchief wrapped around Her thumb, which was an element of court dress of Byzantine ladies usually worn in the hand or on the belt.

The damage to the face and eyes of the figures was inflicted after the Muslim conquest of Nubia, in accordance with the ban on visual representations of living beings observed in Islam.

When the oldest wall paintings were created in the cathedral in Faras, the role of imagery in the Church had already been established. They had become an essential element of liturgy and private devotion. Their function was not limited to decoration or education, but primarily as devices enabling the believers to communicate with God and the saints.

The picture, being a vehicle of theological truth, was supposed to articulate it simply and clearly. The style would express the timeless character of the truths conveyed, hence an explicit tendency towards dematerialization and simple geometrical forms. Sparse, ascetic means of artistic expression would unveil not what is material, earthly and transient, but what is immaterial, divine and eternal.

Increasingly from the tenth century AD, the role of patrons and private founders, both clergymen and laymen, was connected to the royal court, greatly contributing to the variety of forms and themes in paintings. Pictures painted at the time and later may have remained linear and flat with distinct outlines, but they also steadily absorbed characteristic traits of court art. Painters took more care to work on details such as the elements of costume, their ornaments, or forms and decoration of regalia, attributes or weaponry. The colour range broadened, enriched by saturated red, emerald green, blue, and a variety of shades of brown and grey. Colours were boldly paired, for instance, red and green, green and yellow, yellow and blue. Narrative compositions gained more dynamism and expression, as the figures were presented in motion, often vehement, making eye contact with each other and engaging in action.

Among the numerous elements of architectural decoration displayed at the Faras Gallery there are column capitals, cornices, lintels with relief geometric decoration, depictions of animals and Christian symbols like fish, cockerels, eagles or doves and, most of all – the cross. Christian builders would reuse stone blocks with engraved hieroglyphs taken from pharaonic temples.

Near the room displaying the architectural elements found in the cathedral and the wider area of Faras, a display case presents artefacts found in the tombs of bishops – a unique set of objects connected with the burial practices of high-ranking Nubian clergy.

The following part of the exhibition is devoted to the most universal sign of Christian identity – the cross, the theological symbol Christians consider not as a sign of death, but of victory. Crosses exhibited in glass vitrines – hand crosses, processional crosses, pectoral crosses – were once used by the believers of various Eastern rites living in Ethiopia, Egypt, Romania, the Hutsul region, Ukraine, Rus’, and Russia.

The Faras Gallery is home to Europe’s only display of cultural artefacts and artworks from the Christian period in Lower Nubia. Today, 67 of the paintings reside in the National Museum in Warsaw alongside other fascinating artefacts from Faras, making up the largest and most valuable collection of archaeological artefacts from foreign excavation sites so far acquired by any Polish museum.