Faras — The Nubian Cathedral Whose Paintings Survived the Flood

The city of Faras stood in the far north of Sudan, near the Second Cataract and the border with Egypt, and it was a major urban centre in the medieval Nubian kingdom of Nobadia. No building standing on its land remains of its fame today, for the waters of the lake submerged its site in the 1960s, but the paintings of its cathedral have been preserved in two museums, and they have become the most complete surviving record of the art of the medieval Nubian church, as researchers attest.

The story began in 1954, when it was decided to build the High Dam at Aswan, and the huge artificial lake behind it was set to cover the Upper Nile valley from Aswan to the Dal Cataract in Sudan, the region known since antiquity as Nubia. In 1959, the governments of Egypt and Sudan asked UNESCO for help in protecting and saving the threatened antiquities, and in 1960 the organisation's Director-General launched an international appeal on which the Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia was founded, a campaign that ended on 10 March 1980 in a success that UNESCO described as complete and spectacular.

In Sudanese Nubia, the danger covered the Temple of Ramesses at Aksha, the fortified city of Buhen with its two temples from the Egyptian Eighteenth Dynasty, and the temples of Semna East and Semna West. These temples were dismantled and their parts moved, then reassembled together in the museum garden in Khartoum, where they still stand today as witnesses to that operation. As for many other sites, it was not possible to save their buildings, so work there was limited to excavation and documentation before the waters submerged them forever.

At Faras, the Polish archaeological mission led by Professor Kazimierz Michałowski worked between 1961 and 1964, as part of the international campaign, and uncovered an architectural complex centred on a cathedral that was filled with sand, its walls covered with murals painted in tempera on a layer of plaster. Because the church had been renewed and redecorated over the centuries, in places on its walls three or even four successive layers of plaster and painting were superimposed, with works dating to the period between the eighth and fourteenth centuries AD, and the accompanying inscriptions, foremost among them the list of bishops, helped to establish the chronological sequence of the stages of the cathedral's decoration.

When it proved impossible to move the church in its entirety to a safe site for technical reasons, it was decided to remove the paintings from the walls and transfer them. Under the terms of UNESCO's Nubian campaign and the agreement between the two countries, 67 paintings went to the National Museum in Warsaw, and the remaining paintings went to the Sudan National Museum in Khartoum, where the two Faras collections are exhibited in the two capitals to this day. The story of Faras remains a documented example that saving Sudanese heritage was not a local effort alone, but the fruit of wide international cooperation that preceded the flooding by years of precise fieldwork.

📚 Sources: UNESCO — World Heritage Centre, "Campaign to Save the Monuments and Sites of Nubia" and "International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia"; National Museum in Warsaw — Annual of the Museum, Studies on the transfer and restoration of the Faras Cathedral paintings (1961–1974) and the Faras exhibition "Treasures from the Drowned Desert" — Editorial Team