Egypt Guide
Alexandria and the Mediterranean coast
Coptic Cathedral
Opening time: Daily services 6-8pm and 8-10pm
Across the road, another set of gates marked by crosses betrays the Coptic Cathedralof St Mark, in a compound enclosed by taller buildings, entered from Sharia al-Kineesa al-Kobtiyya (once Rue de l'Eglise Copte), which joins Nabi Daniel further south. The cathedral is named after the Apostle martyred by pagans in 67 AD; kidnapped while giving Mass, he was dragged by horses through the streets of Alexandria, where his remains were held by a local church until 828, when the Venetians smuggled the body out of Muslim-ruled Alexandria in a barrel of salt pork, to reinter it at the Basilica di San Marco; the head was transferred to the custody of the Church of Mari Girgis in Cairo. In 1997, Pope John Paul II returned one of St Mark's fingers to Pope Shenouda III as a gesture of ecumenical reconciliation. A novel reinterpretation of this story was recently proposed by Andrew Chugg, who argues that Alexander's body was secretly buried in the guise of St Mark's relics after Emperor Theodosius prohibited the worship of Alexander in 391 AD, and was later smuggled abroad by Venetians unaware of its true origin.
The cathedral itself is an early twentieth-century Byzantine pastiche, whose interior was unfairly described by Forster as "fatuously ugly". Remains of some of the first 47 patriarchs of the Alexandrian See are buried in a chapel to the left of the iconostasis.