Vol.I - The Coptic Orthodox Church

CH. iv.] The Roman Fortress. 235
hidden in the altar-cavity ; and
again in 1 280 A.D.
under the Mameluke sultan Al Ashraf Khalil,
founder of the beautiful mosques which bear his
name, and of the Khan Khalili in Cairo,
still the
finest bazaar in the world. Some twenty years later
the same relentless enemy of the Nazarenes closed
all the churches of Cairo, and Al Mu'allakah re-
mained shut for nearly two years.
There the history ends abruptly, and the imagination
has to leap over a gulf of nearly six centuries
to find the ancient and venerable fabric in danger of
suffering to-day, at the hands of its friends, worse
ruin than it has received in the shocks of war and
the clash of creeds during perhaps sixteen hundred
years of existence 1 .
The Church of Burbarah, or St. Barbara.
St. Barbara to whom this church is dedicated was,
according to the Coptic calendar, '
the daughter of a
great man in the land of the East,' and suffered martyrdom
under Maximinus 2 . The church is a large
and lofty building of the eighth or ninth century, and
must have been of : great importance but I can find
1 I revisited the church early in 1884, and am bound to admit
that as a whole, and with the exceptions noted at the beginning
of this chapter, the restoration has been carried out with more care
and truthfulness than seemed possible when I wrote the above
paragraph.
2
Malan, Notes on the Calendar, p. 61.