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Egypt: Opera House Resumes Activities with 40 Concerts

Egyptian Minister of Culture outside the Cairo Opera House
Egyptian Minister of Culture outside the Cairo Opera House
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Egypt: Opera House Resumes Activities with 40 Concerts

Egyptian Minister of Culture outside the Cairo Opera House
Egyptian Minister of Culture outside the Cairo Opera House

After having suspended all activities over more than three months, the Cairo Opera House will resume its activities with 40 performances to be held in open-air theaters this summer season.

Strict precautionary measures suggested by the Egyptian Ministry of Culture will be taken to protect the fans in attendance.

Major stars from Egypt and the Arab world are scheduled to perform, including Mohamed Mounir, who performed at the opening of the Arab Music Festival on the main stage of the Cairo Opera House last year, Omar Khairat, Ali Al-Hajjar, Medhat Saleh, the Cairo Symphony Orchestra and Yahya Khalil.

The live concerts will kick off on July 9th, after three months of online concerts that had been presented by the Egyptian Ministry of Culture as part of its Stay at Home ... Culture is Between Your Hands initiative, which aimed to encourage citizens to stay at home to curtail the spread of the new coronavirus.

Despite the exceptional circumstances, this season’s diverse and rich performances will alleviate isolation, according to Mohamed Mounir, the media spokesman for the Egyptian Ministry of Culture, who adds:"All 40 of the new season’s concerts will be held in large open-air theaters that can accommodate performers and allow for compliance with the rules of social distancing.”

The Minister of Culture’s summer program caters to attendees’ diverse tastes, from fans of classical, Arabic, and jazz music, to youth groups.”

He is also keen to point out that "the new concerts will not affect the virtual performances program which the ministry kicked off more than three months ago, especially in light of the Minister's directives to develop them further.

"The Ministry coordinated with the National Media Authority to broadcast the opera concerts live on Egyptian television."

For the first time in months, tickets for shows at the Cairo Opera House can be purchased online through its official website, and, per the Egyptian government’s directives, attendance will be limited to 25% of the venue's capacity.

Attendees will be sanitized upon entry after they have their temperature taken, and social distancing rules will apply.

Attendees are to wear face masks and remain at a safe distance from one another, and the venues will be sanitized and decontaminated before and after each performance.

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Palestinians in Syria Flock to Cemetery Off-Limits under Assad

People pray by the grave of a relative in a damaged cemetery at the Yarmuk camp for Palestinian refugees in the south of Damascus on December 14, 2024. (AFP)
People pray by the grave of a relative in a damaged cemetery at the Yarmuk camp for Palestinian refugees in the south of Damascus on December 14, 2024. (AFP)
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Palestinians in Syria Flock to Cemetery Off-Limits under Assad

People pray by the grave of a relative in a damaged cemetery at the Yarmuk camp for Palestinian refugees in the south of Damascus on December 14, 2024. (AFP)
People pray by the grave of a relative in a damaged cemetery at the Yarmuk camp for Palestinian refugees in the south of Damascus on December 14, 2024. (AFP)

In a war-ravaged Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, Radwan Adwan was stacking stones to rebuild his father's grave, finally able to return to Yarmuk cemetery after Bashar al-Assad's fall.

"Without the fall of the regime, it would have been impossible to see my father's grave again," said 45-year-old Adwan.

"When we arrived, there was no trace of the grave."

It was his first visit there since 2018, when access to the cemetery south of Damascus was officially banned.

Assad's fall on December 8, after a lightning offensive led by opposition factions, put an end to decades of iron-fisted rule and years of bloody civil war that began with repression of peaceful anti-government protests in 2011.

Yarmuk camp fell to the opposition early in the war before becoming an extremist stronghold. It was bombed and besieged by Assad's forces, emptied of most of its residents and reduced to ruins before its recapture in 2018.

Assad's ouster has allowed former residents to return for the first time in years.

Back at the cemetery, Adwan's mother Zeina sat on a small metal chair in front of her husband's gravesite.

She was "finally" able to weep for him, she said. "Before, my tears were dry."

"It's the first time that I have returned to his grave for years. Everything has changed, but I still recognize where his grave is," said the 70-year-old woman.

Yarmuk camp, established in the 1950s to house Palestinians who fled or were expelled from their land after Israel's creation, had become a key residential and commercial district over the decades.

Some 160,000 Palestinians lived there alongside thousands of Syrians before the country's conflict erupted in 2011.

Thousands fled in 2012, and few have found their homes still standing in the eerie wasteland that used to be Yarmuk.

Along the road to the cemetery, barefoot children dressed in threadbare clothes play with what is left of a swing set in a rubble-strewn area that was once a park.

- 'Spared no one' -

A steady stream of people headed to the cemetery, looking for their loved ones' gravesites after years.

"Somewhere here is my father's grave, my uncle's, and another uncle's," said Mahmud Badwan, 60, gesturing to massive piles of grey rubble that bear little signs of what may lie beneath them.

Most tombstones are broken.

Near them lay breeze blocks from adjacent homes which stand empty and open to the elements.

"The Assad regime spared neither the living nor the dead. Look at how the ruins have covered the cemetery. They spared no one," Badwan said.

There is speculation that the cemetery may also hold the remains of famed Israeli spy Eli Cohen and an Israeli solider.

Cohen was tried and hanged for espionage by the Syrians in 1965 after he infiltrated the top levels of the government.

Camp resident Amina Mounawar leaned against the wall of her ruined home, watching the flow of people arriving at the cemetery.

Some wandered the site, comparing locations to photos on their phones taken before the war in an attempt to locate graves in the transformed site.

"I have a lot of hope for the reconstruction of the camp, for a better future," said Mounawar, 48, as she offered water to those arriving at the cemetery.