Remembering Abouna Samaan, Creator of Cairo’s Cave Church
US evangelical leaders and thousands of Copts honor an Orthodox priest whose cave church complex chiseled the glory of God into Egypt’s “Garbage City.”
On October 11, 2023, Egypt’s beloved Abouna (“Father”) Samaan passed away at the age of 81. Two days later, over 40,000 people gathered at the famed cave churches in his St. Simon the Tanner Monastery for perhaps the largest Christian funeral service in Coptic Orthodox history.
His renown, however, stretched far beyond Egypt to include many luminaries in the Western evangelical world. And over the course of Abouna Samaan’s life, their endorsement helped popularize his “Garbage City” outreach, to the extent that Trip Advisor counts its Scripture-carved walls and chiseled biblical panoramas alongside museums, mosques, and the Nile River as one of the ten must-see sites in Cairo.
The black-robed and white-bearded priest was born in 1941 with the birth name of Farahat Ibrahim. An otherwise ordinary Egyptian Christian, he worked as a typesetter at the printing press of St. Mark’s Coptic Cathedral. Over time, he came to know the Lord in a personal way through the “Society for the Salvation of Souls,” a Coptic revivalist group that chooses to remain in the Orthodox church while reaching the unreached with the gospel.
Farahat became a diehard evangelist, urging an individual conversion to Christ.
In 1972, the newly married typesetter led Qidees, his neighborhood garbage collector, to the Lord. The young couple lived in Shubra, a Coptic-majority neighborhood of Cairo, and Qidees transported the area trash 13 miles east to a shantytown at the foothills of Egypt’s Mokattam Mountains. Three years earlier a community of very poor Christians had migrated from Upper Egypt in search of a better life and eked out a living recycling useful waste and feeding pigs with the edible remains. ...