virgin mary church - maadi

we went to the church late at night and there for it looked so misteriuos. strange but at that time there was the ceremony of egyptian wedding. so interesting!!! the small wooden cross always remindes me of that place and my new friends that gifted it to me.

After their short stay in Old Cairo, the Holy Family moved in a southerly direction, reaching the modem Cairo suburb of Maadi which, in earliest Pharaonic times, was an outlying district of Memphis, the capital of Egypt then; and, at Maadi, they boarded a sailing-boat which carried them up the Nile  towards southern Egypt. The historic church built upon the spot from which they embarked, also dedicated to the Virgin, is further identified by the denominative, ‘Al Adaweya’, the Virgin’s Church ‘of the Ferry’. (In fact, the name of that now modern suburb, Maadi, derives from the Arabic word which means ‘the Crossing Point’).

An event of miraculous importance occurred on Friday the 3rd of the Coptic month of Baramhat - the 12th of March -1976 A.D. A Holy Bible of unknown provenance was carried by the lapping ripples of the Nile to the bank below the Church. It was open to the page of Isaiah 19:25 the page declaring,”Blessed be Egypt My People”. The Bible is now behind glass in the Sanctuary of the Virgin in the Church for all to see.

The stone steps leading down to the River’s bank, and believed to have been used by the Holy Family, are accessible to pilgrims through the Church courtyard.