The Church of the Ezbawiya Holy Virgin is a small chapel in Downtown Cairo with an aura of mystic spirituality. The site was visited by the Holy Family during its sojourn in Egypt in the first century. Now it is a sanctuary for those burdened with problems, who come to seek consolation and solace, gazing on the icon of Ezbawiya known as the ‘Icon of Wonders’.
The Ezbawiya church is affiliated to the Syrian Monastery of the Holy Virgin in Wadi Natroun.
Watermelon field
When the Holy Family long ago came to the site where Ezbawiya Church is today built, it was then but a small field on the outskirts of the city. Tradition has it that the owner of the field was planting watermelon seeds, and the strangers asked permission to rest a while. The man warmly welcomed them, and St Mary told him about their flight from the face of Herod who was seeking to kill the baby Jesus. The man was greatly moved, and was more surprised to hear from St Mary that the seeds he was planting would next day turn into ripe watermelons, through the power and blessing of her son.
St Mary, moreover, warned him that the King’s men would pass his field early next morning and would ask about the family of strangers. He should reply, she said, by saying that he had seen the Family pass by while he was planting the seeds. Before the Holy Family left they asked for a drink, so the man lowered his bucket and offered them water from a well. This well is still situated at the entrance of Ezbawiya church.
The following morning, the field was indeed filled with huge watermelons. The soldiers came and the owner of the field told them the family they were looking for had passed by as he was planting the seeds. When they saw the ripe watermelons the soldiers guessed the family had passed the field three or four months earlier, and concluded that it was impossible to trace them after all that time.
St Luke’s painting
During the time of the 109th pope of the Coptic Church, Boutros al-Gawli, the abbot of the Syrian Monastery was Father Abdel-Qoddous. In 1848 he decided to move the Cairo administrative building and guesthouse of the monastery to a site near St Mark’s Cathedral in Downtown Cairo. The place became known as Atfet al-Ezba, literally ‘the lane of the field’. This was an allusion to the ancient watermelon field which had existed at the site. Later, Fr Abdel-Qoddous bought some nearby houses to expand the guesthouse to accommodate travelling monks or other people in need of shelter. For those who needed to pray he brought a beautiful icon of the Holy Virgin from the Syrian Monastery, placed it in a chamber and lit an oil lamp before it. As time passed, the chamber became a chapel, and the icon—which had by then acquired the name of ‘Ezbawiya’—acquired a reputation of holiness, and attracted many people of different religions and races, especially those who suffered from ailments or emotional or circumstantial troubles. They found their requests and prayers answered through the ‘Icon of Wonders’ as it became known.
The icon is a copy of an original painting by St Luke; both the original and copy were at the Syrian monastery. The face of Baby Jesus in the icon is of a mature young man, because St Luke drew it when he was acquainted with Jesus Christ during his adulthood. The Virgin Mary is portrayed holding a sceptre, with Baby Jesus seated on her knee. Beneath the baby’s feet St John the Baptist appears kneeling, and behind him is a small lamp. The icon colours are mostly dark, dusky reds and browns. Unfortunately, the original painting was burnt by a candle in 1978, but the copy icon was restored and cleaned with specialist help.
The thirteenth day
A well-known miracle occurred in the 1940s. A Greek woman visited Ezbawiya Church on 12 consecutive days, and on each visit she gave the priest a riyal (a 20-piastre coin) for charity and asked him to sing a ritual praise for the Virgin in front of her icon. During that time, the woman’s tears flowed down her cheeks, and she seemed to be in great distress. The priest asked her the reason for all this sadness and she told him that her son had been enlisted in the British army and sent to fight in Lebanon. He used to write to her, but after some time nothing came from him and she feared he had been killed or wounded.
On the thirteenth day, the priest found the woman waiting anxiously for him by the door of the Church; this time she was elated. She gave a full Egyptian Pound—a considerable sum in those days—and asked him to say the ritual praises. When he asked for her news, she showed him a letter from her son, translating it from Greek into Arabic. The young man told her that he had been very sick, on the brink of death, when a woman came to visit him, gave him a bottle of medicine to drink and said it would save him. When he asked who she was she said, “My name is Ezbawiya and your mother has sent me to you.”
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