Four centuries later, I wandered the labyrinthine streets of Toledo’s old quarter and ended up, like most pedestrians, in the Alcaná, a name that comes from the Arabic al-janat, meaning “the (market) stands.” It is still a bustling center of commerce, and a plaque, inconspicuously tucked beneath a second story window, commemorates the spot’s connection to Don Quixote. Along my way, I passed historic city gates and buildings awash in horseshoe arches, decorative tiles and intricate plasterwork, all reflecting the medieval and early Renaissance Christian enthusiasm for designs that flourished in al-Andalus, or Muslim Spain. Overshadowing the lot loomed the massive profile of Toledo Cathedral, a glorious synthesis of Gothic and Islamic architectural styles. During the 12th and 13th centuries, Jewish, Muslim, and Christian scholars from various parts of Europe flocked here to translate philosophical and scientific works from classical Arabic into Latin, Hebrew, Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) and vernacular Castilian. Centered in and around the cathedral cloister, the collective effort gained fame as Toledo’s “School of Translators.”
Given this long multilingual and multinational history, it comes as no surprise that Cervantes chose Toledo for what happens next in the novel. Stumbling upon an intriguing Arabic manuscript being sold for scrap among the Alcaná’s warren of shops, the narrator seeks out a translator. Upon locating an obliging, Castilian-speaking Morisco—a descendent of Spanish Muslims forcibly converted to Christianity—he learns the author of the text is a fictional Arab historian named Cide Hamete Benengeli.
Here, as he does elsewhere, Cervantes signals links to Arab-Moorish identities. Cide is equivalent to Señor, derived from the Arabic sayyid, meaning “sir.” Hamete comes from Hamid, a popular Arab name. Benengeli, or berenjena in Spanish, means “eater of eggplant,” a vegetable associated with the diets of both Moriscos and Conversos, Spanish Jews who were likewise forced to convert. The narrator is further delighted to learn the manuscript is entitled History of Don Quixote of La Mancha, a purportedly historical account of the very book the narrator has been, thus far in the novel, describing to the reader.
Paying for the manuscript with a half-reale coin, the narrator then retires with the interpreter to the cathedral cloister and has him translate more. Ultimately, he hires the Morisco to spend the next month and a half under his roof, translating “the entire history, just as it is related here.”
So from this point on, the primary narrator of one of Western literature’s seminal masterpieces—a work the late literary critic Harold Bloom identified as the world’s “first modern novel”—is in fact an Arab chronicler. While a figment of Cervantes’ imagination, Cide Hamete Benengeli is equally the product of Spanish literary, political and cultural history. He is also not the only character with Muslim roots to appear in the novel. Throughout Don Quixote, Cervantes makes frequent references to Islamic culture, the Arabic language, and the longstanding relations that existed among Spain’s various ethno-religious groups.
“The point Cervantes is making with the Morisco interpreter is that there are still people running around Toledo who know Arabic or Hebrew, and so he is pushing back against the idea that Spain has somehow become a purely Catholic country that doesn’t bear traces of its long history of the presence of Jews and Muslims on the peninsula,” Barbara Fuchs, professor of Spanish and English at UCLA, told me before I left for Spain. Controversially, Cervantes also took issue with the fate of the Moriscos, whose exile from the Iberian Peninsula in the early 17th century ended 900 years of convivencia, or coexistence. Yes, Don Quixote is a famously funny novel, Fuchs acknowledged. But it is also, in her opinion, “a very subversive book.”
Published in two parts, in 1605 and 1615, Don Quixote was written during a turbulent era of deeply divided loyalties. After the Nasrid emirate of Granada, the Iberian peninsula’s last Islamic kingdom, fell in 1492 to Spain’s King Ferdinand ii and Queen Isabella i, Muslims were initially promised they could continue their way of life “para siempre jamás,” (“forever and ever”). But following local uprisings provoked by forced conversions and public burnings of the Qur’an, the Crown reneged.
Calamitously and practically overnight, Islam, Muslim dress, the Arabic language and even Arab names were outlawed. Muslims faced baptism as Christians, or exile. Many acquiesced to the former. They became “New Christians” and were labelled Moriscos, a pejorative indicating not only a former Muslim identity, but also inferior social status. Others defied the edict to varying degrees, outwardly professing conversion while covertly practicing Islam. These “crypto-Muslims” became a leading target of the church’s Holy Office of the Inquisition, established under Ferdinand and Isabella. A second Morisco rebellion, from the Alpujarras mountains, in 1568 was brutally crushed and, in its aftermath, some 80,000 Moriscos were forcibly relocated north, mainly to the provinces of La Mancha, New Castile and Extremadura.
“The official way of thinking was that Moriscos were traitors and that they were hiding their religion and culture from the authorities,” says Fernando Luis Fontes Blanco, director of Toledo’s Museo de Santa Cruz. “On the other hand, there was a lot of tolerance of the Moriscos, especially in La Mancha, where many Morisco families were able to integrate into society.”
At the same time, Spain was jockeying for New World dominance against a host of Old World colonialist rivals including England, France and The Netherlands, while waging war on European soil against all three. To the east, Spain faced Ottoman encroachment and hostility, especially to its maritime trade interests in the Mediterranean. The Crown’s fears of collusion (not entirely unfounded) among the Ottomans, European Protestants and aggrieved Moriscos meant the latter became an even greater target of suspicion and bigotry. This gave Spanish Christian nativists opportunities to spread rumors that all Moriscos not only imperilled national security but also threatened to overwhelm Spain’s Cristiano Viejo (Old Christian) majority and contaminate what they believed to be its purely Spanish-Christian limpieza de sangre (purity of blood).
Between 1609 and 1614, over the objections of landowners who had come to rely on Morisco labor and even The Holy See, which regarded Moriscos as Christian souls, the Crown rounded up and deported some 300,000 Moriscos. The Crown further decreed that children under 7 years of age should be separated from their families at the deportation centers and handed over to Cristiano Viejo families throughout Spain to be raised as domestic servants and Christians.
Like the times he lived in, Cervantes’ own relationship with Islam, Moriscos, and the idea of limpieza de sangre was complicated. He was born in 1547 in the university town of Alcalá des Henares in Castile, about 35 kilometers northeast of Madrid. He achieved fame, though not necessarily fortune, as a freelance writer, poet and playwright. Freelance writing being what it is and always has been, he supplemented his income with stints as a farmer, accountant, bureaucrat, and tax collector, most of which proved dead ends. If there was one endeavor at which he excelled, aside from writing, it was doing time in jail.
In 1575, after fighting the Ottomans in the Mediterranean crippled his left arm, Cervantes was captured by Barbary pirates. He endured five years in prison in Algeria, where he was beaten, tortured, and, after numerous unsuccessful attempts at escape, eventually ransomed and released. Yet in Algiers he also experienced another layer of multiethnic, multicultural existence, one in which Muslims, Jews and Christians were more or less coexisting—in contrast to what was happening back home in Spain.
“During his years in captivity … [Cervantes] had the opportunity to get to know first-hand the life and customs of the Ottomans, of the Moors, of the Jews, of the renegades (and) of the Christian prisoners,” observed the University of Navarra’s Celsa Carmen García Valdés in her 2005 article, “Life and Literature: Tolerance in Cervantes’ Work.”
Back in Spain, Cervantes was jailed for embezzlement, a relatively understandable offense since skimming off the top was often the only way a collector of royal taxes could get paid. In between jail and work, he wandered: Rome, Madrid, Valladolid, and Esquivias in Castile-La Mancha, where he lived on his wife’s family farm with Moriscos as neighbors. He also spent time in Seville, where, in addition to working as a purchasing agent for the Armada, it is also said he began to write Don Quixote—in jail.
A plaque on the bank where the Royal Jail in Seville once stood commemorates the spot as the birthplace “for the amazement and delight of the world of the ingenious nobleman Don Quijote de La Mancha.” Opposite lurked the more menacing local prison run by the Inquisition. Upon his release, the story goes, Cervantes walked through the alley separating the two jails, holding in his hand the first draft of his most famous work.
Gracious palm trees now shade a nearby bust of the author clutching a manuscript on which is inscribed the novel’s memorable opening line, “En un lugar de La Mancha” (“Somewhere in La Mancha”). I gave the statue a respectful nod on my way to meet with the University of Seville’s professor of Arab and Islamic Studies, Rafael Valencia, one of Spain’s most eminent scholars of al-Andalus. (Tragically, Valencia suffered a fatal heart attack just four months later.) We sat in a cafe sheathed in vibrant azulejo tiles, boisterous testaments to the city’s historic fame as a pottery and ceramics center. Traditionally produced by Moriscos just across the Guadalquivir River in Triana, a busy commercial neighborhood, the tiles harken back to the multiculturalism of al-Andalus.
“An important thing to understand is that Cervantes and Don Quixote were living among two worlds. On the one hand, Don Quixote is the most Christian, the most Spanish figure in Spanish literature, but he is also the most open to the Moors, to the Arabs,” says Valencia.
Cervantes, like his characters, may have occupied two worlds himself. Scholars speculate that he was perhaps of Converso ancestry. Even though he was a devoted Catholic, the Cervantes name was among those discovered in an official 15th-century document listing families with Converso bloodlines. His grandfather’s work in the cloth industry and his father’s profession as a barber and surgeon put them among trades dominated first by Jews and subsequently by Conversos. This background may have stymied Cervantes’ career, at least in the civil service, where ancestry carried political clout. Thus, his obsession with limpieza de sangre and the challenges and frustrations of what it is to live outside looking in—be it as a Converso, a Morisco or a silly old man who thinks he is a knight in armor—became important subtexts of Don Quixote.
“When the Moriscos were expelled by Philip iii, Cervantes had to take the official position that they needed to be expelled. He never publicly objected to the edict. But secretly, he felt sorrow and sympathy for them,” says museum director Fontes Blanco.
When viewed from this angle, the dualities running throughout Don Quixote—where windmills are giants, country inns are castles and barber’s basins are magic helmets—shift from comic effects to social commentaries. Like the Moriscos, crypto-Muslims or any of those whose pedigrees were iffy, Cervantes, on a personal level, was aware of what it was to inhabit multiple worlds in an era dominated by a monolithic and orthodox Hispano-Christian ruling class that called all the shots. And what’s more, he decided to push back.
“What is original, what is the genius of Don Quixote, is that it wasn’t a work devised to protect the prerogatives of those in power. It was written to appeal to the maximum number of people and offers a positive, sympathetic view of those on the margins of society,” said Cervantes scholar Jose Manuel Lucia Megias, professor of philology at the Complutense University of Madrid.
In Part Two of the novel, Cervantes dedicates Chapter 54 to Moriscos, a chapter he composed even as the convulsive deportations were still taking place. Ricote, a wealthy Morisco and former neighbor of Don Quixote’s companion Sancho Panza, has been expelled from the country, but he returns in disguise to retrieve some buried treasure he was forced to leave behind in Spain. (Again, Cervantes is playing with the names and language: Ricote translates as “rich man.”) Ricote is noticed by Sancho, who embraces him and expresses concern for his safety. “[I]f they catch and recognize you, it will go hard with you,” Sancho warns his old friend. Later, Ricote tearfully recounts the injustice of the expulsions.
“You know very well, O Sancho Panza, my neighbor and friend, how the proclamation and edict of His Majesty issued against those of my race brought terror and fear to all of us,” Ricote says. Yet despite the harshness of the edict, he concludes: “No matter where we are, we weep for Spain, for, after all, we were born here, and it is our native country.”
As he speaks, Ricote gives voice to the hundreds of thousands of Moriscos who were similarly banished from what they considered to be their ancestral homes, an injustice Cervantes went out of his way to call out.
“Ricote is not necessary to the plot of the story, but Cervantes put him in there because he wanted to address the positive aspects of Moriscos, who have an important presence in the novel,” said Megias.
But with the Inquisition looking over the shoulders of writers during his era, Cervantes had to choose his words carefully to portray Moriscos in any positive light, often relying on double entendre and subtle, inside jokes.
When introducing us in Chapter 1 to the character of Alonso Quijana, the aging hidalgo whose immersion in too many “books of chivalry” delude him into believing he is a knight—Don Quixote de La Mancha—Cervantes catalogs the old fellow’s humble diet: hash most nights, the occasional stew, lentils on Fridays, and, on Saturdays, duelos y quebrantos.
This last phrase has posed particular challenges to translators. Literally, it means “trials and sorrows” or “trials and wounds,” of which Don Quixote certainly had his share. But it has also been variously interpreted as “scraps,” “tripe and trouble,” and “eggs and abstinence.” This last translation references Saturday Christian semi-fasts in Spain that commemorate the Spanish defeat of the Muslim Almohads at the Battle of Navas de Tolosa in 1212, which marked the beginning of the Christian Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula from Muslim rule.
Yet, as scholars believe Cervantes was keenly aware, among Moriscos and Conversos, duelos y quebrantos, in the sense of “trials and sorrows,” was also a euphemism for bacon (or ham) and eggs. This staple fare among Christians in La Mancha was used as a way to force Moriscos and Conversos to prove the sincerity of their conversions by eating the dish in public—or face the Inquisition.
Such issues were on the mind of chef Paco Morales in 2016 when he opened the Noor restaurant in Córdoba. Offering diners modern interpretations of historic Andalusian dishes, the ingredients on Morales’ carefully curated menu all date to an age when what you ate (recall Cide Hamete’s cultural identification as an “eggplant eater”) pinpointed who and what you were.
“Food was an important part of culture and a way to manifest religious beliefs,” Morales said as I sampled delicate eggplant fritters with cane honey, sautéed spinach and sheep-milk cheese with basil, and an emulsion of pistachio, smoked herring roe and green apple. While it all tasted heavenly now, it was the “devil’s food” to the Inquisition owing to its historically Muslim associations.
“For example, we have on the menu a dish called caldillo de perro that in English means ‘dog gravy.’ This sauce, made with whiting and bitter orange, got this name because it was eaten by Muslims who the Christians called ‘dogs,’” Morales said.
Moriscos indeed had to publicly endure duelos y quebrantos of many kinds. When the Morisco translator in Toledo’s Alcaná randomly opens the pages of the manuscript by “Cide Hamete” and begins to translate for the first-person narrator, he is amused at a notation in the margin about one Dulcinea of Toboso. This is the high-society lady whom Don Quixote, in his distracted mind, has fabricated from the true object of his affection, a peasant woman named Aldonza Loronzo.
“This Dulcinea of Toboso … they say has the best hand for salting pork of any woman in all of La Mancha,” the Morisco reads aloud with a chuckle. The inside joke here is that Dulcinea/Aldonza is actually a Morisca whose reputation at curing ham was her way of deflecting suspicion away from her Muslim ancestry.
Toboso was one of the many towns in Castile-La Mancha where significant numbers of relocated Moriscos settled in the wake of the 1568 rebellion. Once a busy commercial crossroads, today it is a sedate, agricultural town surrounded by livestock and vineyards. Dulcinea may have been based on the real-life Doña Ana Martínez Zarco de Morales, whose stately, 16th-century farmhouse is now the Dulcinea del Toboso House Museum, where Fontes Blanco also serves as director.
On a tour through the meticulously restored villa, filled to its exposed wooden ceiling beams with authentic 17th-century furniture, he guided me to the estrado on the second floor, where ladies of the era would have gathered to talk, read, sew, and simply pass time sitting on a broad, raised platform strewn with pillows and Oriental rugs. It all still looks very Arab.
“It was a very important part of the house,” Fontes Blanco said. “Even as late as the 18th century in Spain, women sat in the Muslim fashion on carpets and cushions on the floor.”
Other references to Morisco and Arab culture throughout the novel are less subtle. “Blessed be almighty Allah,” Benengeli declares three times at the opening of Part Two, Chapter 8. At a time when Arabic was a forbidden tongue, toward the end of Part Two, Chapter 67, Don Quixote offers Sancho a linguistics lesson in various “Moorish” words “that begin with al” common to the Castilian vernacular. In Part Two’s Chapter 26, Don Quixote interrupts a puppet show based on the medieval Spanish ballad “The Romance of Don Gaiferos,” about a knight who storms Sanseuña (Zaragosa) to rescue his kidnapped bride-to-be. When the boy narrating the show declares the city was “flooded with the sound” of bells ringing in alarm “from all the towers of the mosques,” Don Quixote interjects, “the Moors do not use bells but drums and a kind of flute” to raise alarms. Aware that no minaret has a bell, he adds that “ringing bells in Sanseuña is a great piece of nonsense.”
Don Quixote also enables Cervantes to probe contemporary, often paradoxical attitudes toward Islam, Islamic culture and Moriscos. Idealized stories and ballads of noble, knightly “Moors” and their ladies from the medieval past—a genre collectively known as romancero morisco—were widely popular during Cervantes’ time, “even as Moriscos were increasingly persecuted,” Fuchs pointed out. Cervantes’ genius was to cash in on the familiarity of that genre while modernizing it and, along the way, demonstrating how fluid identities could be.
In Part One, Chapter 37, Cervantes introduces what is known to scholars as “The Captive’s Tale.” Perhaps the most autobiographical section of the novel, it tells the story of the fictional Ruy Pérez de Viedma, a Christian soldier who escapes an Ottoman prison in Algiers and returns to Spain with Zoraida, the daughter of “a wealthy Moor named Agi Morato.” Agi Morato was based on Cervantes’ own experience with the real-life Haci Murad, a renegade Dalmatian Christian who rose to power through service to the Ottoman sultans in Algiers and who was instrumental in saving Cervantes’ life. Murad’s real daughter Zahara never eloped with a Christian captive—let alone Cervantes himself—but she did marry Abu Marwan Abd al-Malik, who was none other than sultan of Morocco.
Cervantes writes that Viedma, wearing a “short blue woollen tunic … breeches of blue linen … ankle boots the color of dates and a Moorish scimitar” strapped across his chest—enters a tavern with Zoraida, who is similarly dressed in Muslim attire, “her face hidden by a veil.” He speaks to her in Arabic, but she knows enough Spanish to declare that now that she is on Spanish soil, she wishes to be addressed as “Maria.” When questioned by the innkeeper’s wife if she is Muslim or Christian, Viedma responds that she is a “Moor in her dress and body” but in her soul desires to become a Christian, and has delayed her baptism because she has not yet been properly instructed in “all the ceremonies” required for the service.
Here Cervantes jabs at the hypocrisy of both church and state: When Muslims were forced to convert, many were simply rounded up and baptized in churches (many of which were formerly mosques) with little or no theological instruction in the Christian faith. Under such circumstances, conversion rings hollow. Furthermore, if society can find a place for “the exotic Zoraida,” as Fuchs observed, “whatever her ethnic and cultural differences,” then it can surely find room for the far more proximate Moriscos who were at the time being herded onto ships and deported.
This episode is one of many throughout the novel that emphasize why dialogue, said Megias, is a key to understanding Cervantes and his most famous characters, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. They are figures from different classes and backgrounds, one educated, one not; one practical-minded, one not so much, who nonetheless find common ground by journeying together and, most importantly, listening to one another.
“Don Quixote is a minor noble who reads books. Sancho Panza is a laborer who has never read a book in his life, and whose understanding of the world comes from street smarts,” said Megias.
But as the novel progresses, they are each transformed. As they travel through the Spanish countryside, Sancho learns from Don Quixote just as if he were reading a book, and Don Quixote learns from Sancho what he would never find in his library.
What Cervantes is telling us, in an unintentionally modern way, said Megias, is that “change happens when we are willing to listen to and can accept and look positively upon someone who is different from you. And that’s why people of other cultures and other times have been able to read and identify with this book.”
The author gives special thanks to Duane Alexander Miller for research and translation and to Ana Carreño Leyva for logistical support.
Nasi goreng (fried rice) features in both Malaysian and Indonesian cuisine. It has an interesting blend of tastes and textures. In the Far East, the dish generally includes a dried shrimp paste, called blachan in Malaysia and terasi in Indonesia, but this recipe substitutes bean curd/tofu. Some recipes have an omelet added. This is cooked first, then cut into strips and added to the dish at the end.
Cook the rice in boiling water for 10–15 minutes, and then drain.
While the rice is cooking, season the beaten eggs. Heat some oil in a frying pan and, when hot, pour in the eggs and swirl round to make an omelet. Cook for a few minutes until golden and then tip it out onto a plate. Roll it up, leave to cool and then slice into strips.
Now heat some more oil and sauté the shallots, scallions / spring onions and ginger for 1–2 minutes. Then add the carrot, cabbage and sultanas and continue to stir-fry for 3 minutes until tender.
Next, put in the cooked rice and bean curd / tofu and toss with the vegetables. Combine the soy sauce, sesame oil and curry paste or chili sauce. Pour this over the ingredients and mix well. Adjust the flavorings to taste.
Arrange the omelet strips and cucumber slices on top and scatter the cilantro / coriander over before serving.
Reprinted with permission from
One World Vegetarian Cookbook
Troth Wells 2011, Interlink Books, 978-1-56656-834-0, $35 hb, www.interlinkbooks.com.
Troth Wells is an Oxford-based food writer and author of cookbooks including also The Spices of Life (2001), Global Vegetarian Cooking (2010) and Small Planet, Small Plates: Earth-Friendly Vegetarian Recipes (2012), all published by Interlink Books.
]]>Everything is different this year.
Including my father Waleed’s birthday. He works in Oman and comes home to Bahrain every weekend. As expected, his routine changed this year. When travel was banned he was stuck in Oman. But when a plane was set to travel back to Bahrain, he was on it. Under the rules implemented by the government of Bahrain, any person who flew into the country needed to quarantine for two weeks. A few days after his return, April 12 was his birthday.
This picture shows him inside his room at our family home. My mother, who is carrying the cake, and my brother and grandmother and I surprised him. We accepted that the family reunion was without hugs and kisses, but it is enough that he is with us now.
To me, this picture depicts love and a family bond. It’s an image that one day I might show to my kids when I tell them about 2020, and maybe they will understand through this picture that no matter what circumstances the world takes you through, a family bond stays strong.
—Khalid Alabbas
@khalid_artz
The bones of my kin were found in jars some 4,300 years old buried in a temple at Qal‘at al-Bahrain. I invite you to recall my noble role as Mucalinda, Buddha’s half-human, half-cobra Naga. Do not forget I am the rainbowed Aidophedo of the Ashanti of West Africa, the many-headed Shesha of Hinduism and the cosmic Quetzalcoatl of Meso-america, and that for centuries I gazed from the brows of the pharaohs as the sacred serpent-goddess Uraeus of Egypt. I was the wise Wadjet of the Nile Delta and the silent Meretseger, guardian of the dead at Thebes. I was the good serpent Mehen who fought off the evil Apophis every night when the sun god Ra sailed through the dangers of dark. I attended dear Isis and, so the Egyptians have said, fathered Alexander the Great. And still, I crawl accused of killing Egypt’s last great queen, Cleopatra vii.
As if it could not be worse, you cultivate this calumny early in the lives of your whelps. Toy Cleopatras come accessorized with plastic asps as do most Cleopatra Halloween costumes. Video games cast me in the vile role of venomous assassin of a voluptuous queen; misguided marketers launch ad campaigns for “Just Bitten” cosmetics featuring a stand-in Cleopatra with lips its wearers will “die for.” More dangerous are your cigarettes, sold in art deco boxes embellished with a bust of Cleopatra, who clutches me with more than a touch of defiance. At the risk of seeming a pompous asp, I call out all these hucksters for their slanders against my kind.
Your high culture, alas, is no better than your consumer culture. Canvases depicting poor Cleopatra’s demise, with me as the obvious villain, clutter your museums. Painters Andrea Solari and Peter Paul Rubens showed me long and writhing; Guido Reni and Giovanni Lanfranco painted me wormishly tiny. Claude Vignon and Augustin Hirschvogel gave me the head of a dragon, and Benedetto Gennariand Giovanni Francesco Barbieri brushed on red to show blood dripping from my fangs. But this is not the real me.
This staged demise of Cleopatra and her handmaidens is part of a larger plot to ruin me. Even Shakespeare’s stage directions stated for Antony and Cleopatra that Cleopatra “applies an asp,” as if I were some inanimate apparatus. I find these stage directions as demeaning as the dialog that calls me a “poor venomous fool.”
You see, I, the Egyptian asp, Naja haje, am the victim of overwrought imaginations. I did not kill Cleopatra. Not in Shakespeare’s way or any other.
Let’s examine the facts. Her Highness ruled Ptolemaic Egypt at a time when the Romans were just beginning to take over the eastern Mediterranean world. The mighty queen began as a humble pawn in this inexorable game of Roman imperialism, and civil war and forced her to take sides, first with Julius Caesar and then with his general Marc Antony. She even married Antony to secure the preservation of Egypt, if not as an independent nation, then at least as an equal partner. You may not realize how close she came to success. But in a single battle all was lost. Caesar’s adopted son Octavian, who would become later immortalized as Emperor Augustus, prevailed at the Battle of Actium in the Ionian Sea in 31 bce against the combined forces of Antony and Cleopatra, spelling the end of both the Hellenistic period and Ptolemaic Egypt. Upon losing, Antony committed suicide, whereas Cleopatra was captured and held as a prisoner of war by Octavian’s forces in Alexandria. It is somewhere in this part of their story I usually make my entrance.
According to the Greek geographer Strabo, who may have been in Egypt at the time, the queen killed herself secretly while in Octavian’s custody. Strabo reports that two versions of her suicide were circulated: one, that she suffered at my fangs, while the other claimed she poisoned herself. Strabo himself made no choice between these two theories. Then a few Latin poets, unhindered by facts, scribbled some lines on the subject. They all preferred the more sensational asp story, of course. Patriotic and well-paid by Octavian, these Romans maligned Cleopatra too, calling her regina meretrix, harlot queen, and dedecus Aegypti, shame of Egypt.
In the second century ce, the Greek writer Plutarch penned a detailed rendition of Cleopatra’s last days. Plutarch states that he consulted the published memoirs of Olympus, Cleopatra’s personal physician. Now this sounds promising, until you realize that this doctor was permitted to live—and write—only because he served Octavian. This is the testimony of a tainted witness who claimed that after the death of Antony, Cleopatra became as unhinged as a serpent’s jaw. As her captor, Octavian allegedly did everything in his power to keep the queen, whom Plutarch insists grew demented, from hurting herself. When she tried to starve herself, Octavian could find no other remedy than to threaten her children. This was powerful leverage: Cleopatra had a son with Julius Caesar and three younger kids with Antony.
Plutarch relates that these threats convinced Cleopatra to cooperate. A few days later, Octavian paid her a visit. He found her sickly, unkempt, and still a bit wild-eyed. Yet despite her condition, she hoped to sway Octavian with her beauty and charm. This naturally failed with a man as incorruptible as Octavian (I would wink here if I had an eyelid), so Cleopatra caved and claimed that everything was Antony’s fault. When Octavian countered her excuses, she next tried pity, prayers and promises. In the end she managed only to convince Octavian she wished to live. This made it easier to arrange her own death, having suddenly forgotten the threats against her children.
Octavian had no suspicions when Cleopatra asked whether she and her female attendants might offer a sacrifice at Antony’s tomb. Clutching the ash-urn of her beloved Antony (other sources say he was embalmed), Cleopatra supposedly confided to his cinders her trepidation at becoming a trophy in Octavian’s triumphal parade. She could not bear the humiliation of marching in chains through the streets of Rome. Here, at last, Plutarch gives us a motive for her suicide, thanks to a supposed confession heard by no one who lived to reveal it.
Next, we need means and opportunity. The crafty Cleopatra bathed, dined and then sent Octavian a suicide note while awaiting delivery of a little basket of figs for dessert. This request for room service provided the opportunity to smuggle past her derelict guards the means of her crime—me. Plutarch declares that Octavian’s sentinels checked the basket and did not notice me inside. Now look at me and pay heed to my sinuous swaying swagger and large, unblinking black eyes. We asps average a meter and a half in length. Our heads are large and our snouts broad. Not see me in a snack basket? Yet there I reportedly lay undetected, curled tightly at the bottom, waiting patiently to wipe out three adult women in a locked room? Does that make sense to anyone?
I could not have done it. Though large, we Naja haje do not store enough neurotoxin to kill three of you upright mammals in quick succession. Death could take hours, yet Cleopatra had only minutes before her suicide note brought Octavian running to the scene. Furthermore, Plutarch admits that no trace of me was ever found inside the sealed room—there were no smoking gums. The suggestion that I somehow crawled out a window and escaped along the beach toward the sea is ludicrous.
Even crazier are the specific reports of what Cleopatra said and did inside that closed room, where the only witnesses died with her. Who could have known that I was ever there, that the queen spoke to me before I bit her arm or that she had to provoke me with a golden spindle before I would lunge at her? No woman intent on suicide would entrust her death to me. I could bring nothing to the occasion but a hundred possible misadventures. And for what? She was already a deity; I could do nothing to render her more so.
No matter, my accusers could not push my writhing image out of their minds. When Octavian paraded an effigy of the queen in his triumphal parade, the crowds fixated on a copy of me clinging to her body. Onlookers assumed this to be an official reenactment of her demise, but it may simply have been an Isis snake bracelet. No wonder, after spinning this gossamer of lies Plutarch confesses, “Nobody really knows what happened.” He adds that a concealed poison may have actually done the deed.
A gossipy contemporary of his, a writer named Suetonius, introduced the bizarre anecdote of the Psylli (pronounced, appropriately, like your word “silly”). These were a North African Berber tribe of professional venom suckers who could be summoned to save snakebite victims. Though it was considered heroic work, the job training was brutal. Only men who as children had survived being tossed into a snake pit could take up this trade, so there never were many of them around. Suetonius says Octavian deployed the Psylli in a vain effort to revive Cleopatra.
A century later the Roman Cassius Dio embellished the story even more. He describes with increasing detail the queen’s efforts to seduce the ostensibly virtuous Octavian, who knew better than to look directly at his alluring captive. According to Cassius Dio, she shamelessly tried everything: provocative clothing, sweet looks, a lilting voice, some tender weeping and even old love letters from Caesar, Octavian’s adoptive father.
Spurned and fearing the ignominy of his triumphal parade, Dio’s Cleopatra plotted suicide as Octavian posted guards and a Psylli rescue squad to stop her. Now think about that. Having these venom-suckers on standby would mean that Octavian antici- pated not only me, but also my getting past his guards, who were therefore on alert for a smuggled snake. Since I alone could not have quickly killed all three women inside the chamber, several of us would have needed to slip past Rome’s equivalent of the Keystone Kops—coming and going. Yet Dio casually admits that no one could really know what happened to Cleopatra.
The medical writer Galen mentions the possibility that Cleopatra bit her own arm and then smeared the wound with smuggled venom. This way, I get blamed even in absentia for her death by self-fangulation. Galen must have liked the idea that Cleopatra never actually handled me, for he suggests that if I were there on the scene, I would have been a spitting cobra. What an imagination! The good doctor also claims to know that Cleopatra had her hair and nails done by two attendants, both of whom I spit to death before turning my wads on the queen.
One murder rap apparently deserves another and another. In the 10th century ce, the Baghdad-based historian al-Mas‘udi expanded my killing spree beyond Cleopatra and her female servants. At least he didn’t mutilate her character like the Romans. As with many scholars of the medieval Arab world, he does sing her praises, calling her a “princess versed in the sciences, given to the study of philosophy … [having] composed on medicine, charms and the particulars of other natural sciences.” But al-Mas‘udi cruelly paints me as a merciless savage, even claiming I murdered Octavian as well. That’s an especially interesting fantasy, a bit of alternative facts in which the familiar Western obsession with Octavian’s triumph and empire-building is cut short by yours truly. For you see, al-Mas‘udi alleges me to be a rare two-headed serpent from Hijaz (in western Saudi Arabia) that could spring so fast and so far that my victims never knew they had been bitten. So, after instantly dispatching the women in Cleopatra’s chamber, I hid among the ornamental plants until Octavian entered the room. My stealthy attack paralyzed his right side, giving him just enough time to dictate a Latin poem before his demise. The Romans always get the last word.
Well, not always. One of your poets, Ahmad Shawqi of Egypt, is one of the few who ever came to the queen’s defense. In 1927 he turned the tables—better late than never—charging the Romans of recording history “in a fictive style, in which the Caesars of Rome got all the glory … while the poor Egyptian queen, Cleopatra … got nothing but a heap of accusation, sins and curses.”
Here’s what I think really happened. Start from the fact: In August 30 bce Cleopatra died in the custody of Octavian, her enemy. I would not be surprised if he executed her and clumsily covered up the crime as a suicide-by-asp. Octavian controlled every source of information about Cleopatra’s fate. He shaped his official version with loyal assistance. He had no fear of contradiction or correction. All the Psylli stories about his efforts to save the psychotic queen masked his true intentions—he wanted her dead. Why? Quite simply because Ptolemaic queens were a dangerous commodity and very difficult to be rid of safely. She—the mistress of his father, the wife of his enemy and the mother of his last rival—must never tell her side of the story or be given the chance to charm a world that might be prone to forgiveness. Octavian’s alleged urge to display the captive Cleopatra in his parade was a ruse; he wanted no such thing. Just a few years earlier, Julius Caesar had held such an event in Rome. The spectacle, as anticipated, delighted the crowds—until they saw a Ptolemaic queen marching in chains among the prisoners. That was Arsinoe iv, Cleopatra’s half-sister, and the Romans reacted so vehemently against her humiliation that she had to be released to placate public sentiment. Could Octavian risk a similar outcome with Cleopatra? He had made his fortune fighting to save his world from her, and it would be devastating to his ambitions if she appeared in Rome as anything less than the evil, crazy, seductive monster of his propaganda. Letting her live was an indulgence he could not afford.
But killing Cleopatra had to be carefully arranged. Octavian had ample opportunity, means and motive to eliminate the queen of Egypt before she could arouse anyone’s sympathy. To launder his image, he had to sully hers. His plot achieved its purpose so well that even now, thousands of years later, your visions of Cleopatra—your stereotypes as you call them—voluptuous, vain, promiscuous, treacherous, manipulative, excessive and need I go on—were fostered by Octavian to advance history. His victory rested upon her villainy in the court of public opinion.
That is the same court that has been convicting me of murder over two millennia. Only a few experts, mostly new ones over the past decades, have come to my defense, declaring my innocence with almost unhuman fairness and reason. Still, not many of them are willing to point an accusing finger at Octavian as I would do if I had one. Murder is a hard charge to prove when a suspect owns or eliminates all the evidence. So be it. Believe what you want about Cleopatra’s last moments. Just leave the hiss out of history. Like you, I have my suspicions. And like you, I wasn’t there.
He was 18, he says, and three months after arriving to take English classes at Notre Dame of Maryland University in Baltimore, he was already nearly broke. The few thousand dollars he had brought with him was going fast. His student visa didn’t allow him to work, and his family was not in a position to help.
“I had no idea where I was going to sleep,” says Azamovich, who prefers to use his middle name. Now 30, he is cofounder and ceo of the fast-rising online housing service 4stay, which specializes in furnished room and apartment rentals on flexible terms, especially for students and educational institutions in the us and, increasingly, beyond.
Azamovich, however, had grown up amid adversity. He was 2 years old in 1991, the year Tajikistan achieved its independence as the Soviet Union was dissolving. This was followed by a seven-year civil war, during which Tajikistan’s economy collapsed. After the war, his father, an engineer, and his mother, a seamstress, worked hard and invested in a popular local furniture business. It was enough to send Azamovich to a private school in Khujand, but not enough to help him pay the rents in Washington, dc, one of the most expensive cities in the country. Yet he credits his parents’ resilience during their crises with fueling his own resolve.
Soon he found a way to sell toys and Christmas ornaments at a nearby mall. Then he worked at a pizza shop for minimum wage. He worked on his English, and he cut his expenses by transferring to Northern Virginia Community College (nova). He struggled to make ends meet and pursue his studies for three years.
One evening during Ramadan in August 2010, Azamovich attended a neighborhood iftar, or fast-breaking dinner. Also attending was nova Vice President Paul McVeigh, who told Azamovich he was looking to hire recruiters to bring more students to the college from Central Asia. Would Azamovich be interested in drafting a proposal for the job?
Azamovich invited a friend from high school who had also come to nova, Faridun Nazarov, to collaborate. McVeigh took them on, and they soon began helping prospective students from not only Tajikistan but also Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan come to the college.
He earned enough to rent a two-bedroom apartment. There, he realized that with the landlord’s approval, he could sublease the extra room. This he says was the idea that ultimately led to 4stay: a furnished room he could rent out with no separate deposit, no separate utilities—no surprise costs, and only for the time needed.
Azamovich and Nazarov began connecting the students they were recruiting with furnished rooms for rent, and they soon founded stp (Studying The Planet) Housing Solutions. Word spread, and they also began helping students from Africa, Europe and other parts of Asia come to schools in 15 states. They were finally making enough money to cover more than their own rents.
“We tried to rent out empty spaces using Airbnb. I also used Craigslist and business-to-business partnerships, targeting students and scholars and filling that gap for medium and long-term housing,” he says.
He earned his associate degree in business from nova in 2012 and transferred to Strayer University for a bachelor’s degree in economics with a minor in information technology. He graduated in 2015.
Stp, too, was finished.
“It couldn’t be sustained,” he says, mostly due to the lack of flexibility in the lease terms of its rentals.
“I failed four times,” he says. “However, all those mistakes became an asset for me, as experience.”
In 2017 Azamovich put up $150,000 of his own cash to launch 4stay.com as a flexible-terms online marketplace designed to connect students to furnished apartments or rooms in multifamily settings, family homes or apartments, all on terms that avoided upfront security deposits while providing renters’ insurance and utilities.
Today, 4stay boasts more than 200,000 listings, 80 percent in the us. The company has relationships with more than 400 mostly educational institutions, including 260 colleges and universities. Among 4stay’s corporate backers is Plug and Play, which has also invested in Dropbox and PayPal. His revenue scheme is a simple 10 percent fee per transaction.
This year, when covid-19 hit and sank reservations on major hotel and private accommodation sites such as Booking.com and Airbnb, 4stay has remained above water thanks to its focus on medium- and long-term accommodations.
“We are literally left with almost no competition,” says Azamovich.
Other online businesses that serve a similar population, such as Off Campus Partners and MyRentHero, are doing reasonably well also. Azamovich credits 4stay’s flexible, one-stop approach as key to its growing edge in the industry, but also calls attention to the company’s core commitments “to take care of students,” and now to connect and pair them with “older generations unable to pay for the constantly increasing costs of living alone.”
At present, 4stay has fewer than 20 employees, most of whom work from home, and last year the company clocked $26 million in booking requests. It has also raised more than $1.7 million from angel investors. Its recent partnerships include New York’s Columbia University, the Kaplan International chain of language schools and StudyPA, which runs on- and off-campus housing for state universities throughout Pennsylvania.
Syedur Rahman, nova’s current vice president who manages the international student program formerly headed by McVeigh, describes Azamovich as a “young but very enterprising young man” who helped nova expand its program quickly and efficiently.
“We take a lot of underserved and underrepresented students and make them aspire to dream big,” Rahman says. “Akobir was one of those students. He took the initiative and expanded it into a major operation.”
In addition to life as a busy, young ceo these days, Azamovich has worked with the American Eurasion Congress—a nonprofit he helped establish—to provide medical supplies, food relief and education to people in need in Tajikistan through MoBoVatanem (We Stand with our Motherland), administered through the Embassy of Tajikistan in Washington, dc. It’s from these good deeds, as his late father once advised him, that the “blessing of others will flourish you, like the water flourishes a flower.”
The Potomac River can still remind Azamovich of the Syr Darya and of one of his earliest dreams, “to serve humanity through technology.” It took, he says, “perseverance and desire—qualities you get from your parents.” With that, he reminds himself and others to “follow your heart and prove to yourself that you can accomplish your goals while doing what you like.”
]]>I didn’t grow up with biryani, and for those who have, the only real biryani is the one made in his or her own city, neighborhood or, more likely, family kitchen. Biryani’s power lies not only in its wildly diverse, complex flavors that make first-timers wonder what they have been missing all their lives, but also in its connection to place, perhaps even more so in an era when so many of us live far from where we grew up.
Case in point: Bilal Lakhani, a columnist for Pakistan’s Express Tribune, grew up in Karachi, on the coast, and he went to business school at age 18 in Lahore, in the northeast. He recalls how at the time he and his Karachi buddies were really missing biryani. Having little money, they thought they would find a wedding to crash because weddings, he says, is where you can always find biryani. Pretending, as needed, to be friends of one family or the other, they staked out a wedding and got in the food line.
“Our daring plan was a disaster,” Lakhani recalls. “The biryani didn’t have aloo (potatoes)! How can you have biryani without aloo? That’s an abomination.”
He speaks like a poet of the savory spices that infuse aloo in a good biryani, yet in other places—such as Lahore—the very presence of aloo is, well, anti-biryani. The feelings run deep.
A common biryani origin story begins in the early 1600s with Mumtaz Mahal, wife of Mughal emperor Shahab-ud-din Muhammad Khurram, better known as Shah Jahan. While visiting soldiers at their barracks and seeing them underfed, the story goes, she ordered the cooks to prepare a dish of rice and meat, which they prepared over a wood fire with aromatic spices. “Soldiers had to have their stomachs filled to have the energy to fight,” says Chef Raman Khanna, who learned to cook biryani in the 1980s at the Oberoi Hotel in New Delhi alongside the Oberoi family’s personal chef, Baba Lul. The way the legends go, he says, “at night, military cooks would prepare a big pot of meat and rice and bury it and place coals on top. The next day, the soldiers who survived would come back and dig out the pot and eat.”
The general speculation about the dish’s origins among chefs and food historians includes a belief that Ottoman allies of the Mughals brought pilaf (rice with meat and other ingredients) to the subcontinent, where chefs infused it with local spices and experimented with its method of cooking. Others maintain that a more sophisticated version of the soldiers’ cooking was already popular with the the Mughals themselves when they came from Persia to what is now Afghanistan and that the spice trade that so enriched India’s ports also gave birth to biryani’s flavors. From the imperial palace to the estates of local landowners, those who could afford it employed cooks who refined and even personalized the dish with combinations of saffron, cardamom, rosewater and a host of other spices and aromatics.
“That’s why there is always this feeling of something royal in eating biryani,” says Khanna.
Two fundamental cooking methods for biryani emerged from the palaces of two regions of India.
The first is Kucchi biryani, which is considered Hyderabad-style, he explains. Here, raw meat is marinated for hours, placed in a dum (pot), “layered with rice in varying degrees of doneness” and then steamed.
“The flavors rise and impregnate the rice,” says Kripal Amanna, host of the YouTube show, Food Lovers TV.
The second is Pukki biryani, which is considered Lucknow-style. “Meat and spices are cooked separately until almost done, then layered with rice that is almost cooked, then placed on the dum.”
In both, the biryani is made with equal parts meat and rice, and in the case of potato biryani, 25 percent meat and 25 percent potato, according to Lakhani’s mother, Najma Rafiq. Traditionally, the top of the dum is lined with dough before ingredients are placed inside, and then the biryani takes a half hour to an hour to cook, depending on the size of the pot and biryani type, she says.
Khanna adds that regional biryani chefs may top the pots with coal, wood embers, charcoal or coconut husk, creating additional flavors specific to each region.
“The beauty of this in the Nizam and Nawab Palaces was that when the biryani was ready, the dough was lifted off and the whole dining room was filled with the aroma of the spices. That revelation is what made it into a signature item of India,” Khanna says.
In Lucknow, some versions cook the rice in milk, says Amanna, which makes it “subtler in their flavor notes.”
“The Hyderabad biryani is a brash, grab-your-palate biryani, whereas the Lucknow biryani is shy and more demure. You have to make more of an effort to know it,” Amanna says, explaining also how the Lucknow versions include essences like pandan extract that enhance aroma. “They are like a lady splashing on some perfume, as opposed to that robust Hyderabad biryani with its aggressive onion, garlic and ginger, which let the other spices play second fiddle.”
The variations of these two methods have expanded across the subcontinent. Amanna has filmed 25 shows that revolve around biryani, but that’s not nearly enough, he says.
“Biryani travels every 100 kilometers that you travel. I could easily do 200 episodes on biryani across India and not repeat a particular style,” he says.
He finds the best way to encounter new biryani culinary styles is when he’s traveling by motorcycle.
“You have to take a break every 100 or 150 kilometers. So, you stop and take in the sights and the aromas. You smell some rice and you follow it,” he says, pointing out how this method has allowed him to access hundreds of biryani establishments and recipe variations.
Amanna favors family-owned restaurants that have been making biryani for decades, if not more than a century, including the Rahamaniya Briyani Hotel in Ambur in the state of Tamil Nadu, which adds homemade curd to the meat and spices. He also highlights the Shivaji Military Hotel in Bangalore, where every day about 200-300 kilograms of meat are turned into donner (boat) biryani, which is served in a banana leaf basket that softens to flavor the dish.
Long before the motorcycle, there were ships, and that is how spices came to the Indian subcontinent, often via Arab traders. Pakistani cookbook author Sumayya Usmani spent much of her childhood on the ship her father captained, and her first memory of biryani is her mother stirring together the ingredients in an electric frying pan in the boat’s galley kitchen. Traveling by sea, Usmani’s mother took short cuts with the dish to preserve the limited number of ingredients that could survive the long journeys. Preparing biryani at sea also offered opportunities to add squid, mussels and prawns. Seafood variations often include a green masala of mint, coriander and chilis.
“When I think of making it or even eating it, the fundamental thing about biryani is that it speaks to love, time, patience,” Usmani tells me. “That is why it is such a celebratory dish.”
Usmani now lives in Scotland, where she teaches others to make biryani, including her 11-year-old daughter. Her own mother, Usmani says, taught her to use only basmati rice aged one to two years, because it fluffs, separates and tastes better.
“My mother has drilled this in my head. Unless your rice, after cooking, isn’t as long as one segment of your finger, it’s not worth cooking,” she says, laughing.
Khanna, too, agrees the best biryani cooking class is in a family kitchen.
“Indian chefs do not like to share their recipes,” Khanna says, remembering his early cheffing days at the Oberoi Hotel working for chef Lul. “I had to peel up to 60 kilos of onions every day and pound pastes until my knuckles actually bled in order to get his trust.”
Khanna says the two most important things he learned from Lul were to grind the spices the day they’re used and to wash the rice several times, whether short- or long-grained, so that every single grain will stay separated when cooked.
Meat also varies by region. Goat—often called mutton in India—is the most traditional for biryani, but lamb and chicken are also used. In India’s south, in the state of Kerala, beef biryani is also a specialty. Kerala’s biryani was also much influenced by centuries of trade with the Arabian Gulf.
I asked Khanna, who has catered biryanis for royal weddings and vip events in the uae for a decade, including cooking the dish in the middle of the desert for 2,500 people during the first World Cup of Horse Racing, why so many people in the Gulf think of biriyani as a local dish.
“The spices and rice came to India through the Arabian trade routes, and we brought them back as biryani,” he says, noting that many chefs throughout the Arabian Peninsula hail from Kerala.
The dish continues to vary through time and across regions depending on environment, culture and availability (or lack) of ingredients. With some 30 percent of India eating vegetarian diets—and the popularity of meatless recipes in restaurants worldwide—meatless biryani is increasingly acceptable to biryani purists. But it comes with challenges: Vegetables, Ammana says, struggle to survive the heat of the dum. There are solutions though, like frying the vegetables first or adding them in at the end.
“The beautiful thing about biryani is that everyone can stake claim to it,” he says. “Biryani is one of the very few dishes in which people across the world can say, ‘This is our biryani.’ Everyone can make it their own.”
With land made spectacularly productive by the Mississippi River on one side and the Ohio River on the other, one can understand how the southern tip of the state of Illinois came to be known as “Little Egypt.” In 1818 a charter for incorporation was secured for the town sprouting up where those great arteries of the North American continent joined.
Unlike the Nile, which flooded annually, the Mississippi and Ohio, arriving settlers learned, flooded capriciously and often catastrophically. One of the first major building projects was a system of levees that surrounded the ambitious, water-bound city dubbed “The Gateway to the South.” Cairo’s strategic location came to aid the Union during the us Civil War, when in 1861 General Ulysses S. Grant directed construction of Fort Defiance on the west side of the town, near the precise point where the rivers met. From there in 1862, he staged the attack downriver on Vicksburg, Mississippi, which helped put the Union on its long path to victory.
After the Civil War, Cairo aspired to rival St. Louis as a commercial and transport hub along the Mississippi. In 1868 more than 3,500 boats tied up along its docks. Steam huffed trains across the rivers on bridges built in 1889 and 1905. The city supported a burgeoning class of landowners and speculators as well as merchants, entrepreneurs and laborers who worked the land and the river. The post-Civil War years were boom years, and the population grew also from the northward migrations of formerly enslaved individuals and families seeking opportunity outside the defeated Confederacy. By the turn of the 20th century Cairo had a population of 12,566, of which approximately 5,000 were African American. (The indigenous Potawatomi had been forced to move west of the Mississippi following the Indian Removal Act of 1830.)
In 1910 Cairo was designated as the seat of Alexander County, and its 14,548 inhabitants, according to the census that year, would never be exceeded in later years. An electric trolley plied the main street, Commercial Street, lined with department stores, hotels, auction houses, furniture showrooms, restaurants and taverns, drug stores, specialty shops and entertainment venues including the state-of-the-art, 600-seat Gem Theater. Many of these were depicted in a cornucopia of dozens of picture postcards. Even us President William Howard Taft paid a visit to Cairo on October 26, 1909.
Two weeks later an event took place that stalled the rise of Cairo’s fortunes and sent them into the tailspin from which the city has yet, to this day, to recover. On November 11 an angry crowd of white residents, estimated at 10,000, gathered downtown as William James, a Black resident accused (wrongfully, it was shown later) of killing a white woman, was publicly lynched. Although not the first racially motivated murder in the city, its exposure of festering racism, segregation and political corruption began 110 years of economic and social decline. A century later the census in 2010 counted only 2,831 residents.
But Cairo may yet have another chapter to write. This year the state of Illinois approved the first significant investment in the town in decades: a $40 million grant aimed at reviving Cairo as a 21st-century riverport.
“We strive to always see the positive side of situations and work toward betterment of our small but solid community,” says Monica Smith, director of Cairo’s historic Safford Library, which was inaugurated in 1884.
According to newspaper accounts of the time, it was the postmaster who in 1835 chose Cairo from the two names presented to him by the us Post Office for the new settlement in Georgia. It was incorporated as a town in 1870 and as a city in 1906, at which time it was also named seat of the newly formed Grady County, named after Henry W. Grady, the prominent editor of the Atlanta Constitution and a respected orator.
Located on the edge of the coastal plain, just north of where the state of Georgia meets the Florida Panhandle, this region has been home to Native American tribes including those collectively known as Creeks as well as early traders, settlers and both free and enslaved laborers.
It is a land abundant with small streams, and its European settlers found that its long growing season and rich soil could produce diverse fruits and vegetables including beans, peanuts, pecans and cucumbers that were affectionately named “Cairo Beauties.” Wheat, rye, sorghum and oats grew well. Sugarcane thrived and in 1862, a Cairo farmer named Seaborn Anderson Roddenbery began producing the first cane-based syrup in America. It became a town industry, and to this day the high school sports teams are known as The Syrupmakers.
During the Civil War, the town was not much harmed and, at the turn of the 20th century, counted 1,505 residents. Small in population but long enough on pride to put out postcards, Cairo’s images touted its agriculture and pastoral landscapes as well as its county-seat role that underpinned an increasingly diverse economy that also included fishing and forestry.
In 2019 the us Postal Service stepped again into the town’s story when it issued a centennial commemorative stamp in honor of the birth, on January 31, 1919, of the town’s best-known son, Jack “Jackie” Roosevelt Robinson, who in 1947 made us sports history as the first Black athlete to play major league baseball in the modern era.
Still considered rural 150 years after its birth, Cairo today boasts an active public library, a history museum, and a restored movie theater that claims to be Georgia’s oldest. With 9,607 people counted in the 2010 census, it is the largest Cairo in the us. It is increasingly tied to Tallahassee, the capital of Florida 50 kilometers to the south.
With a population of around 300 today, Cairo, West Virginia, perches amid the gentle hills along the North Fork of the Hughes River. It’s a region that was inhabited by Iroquois and Shawnee peoples until the 17th century, when diseases came in advance of settlers, and conflict with other tribes and settlers followed. The town’s formal history began in 1856, when it became a railroad station along the B&O (Baltimore and Ohio) Railroad line. Its first settlers, all Scotch Presbyterians, gave it the name, having found the river ample and the soil good.Just a few years later, oil and gas were discovered below the topsoil, and postcards from the late 19th and early 20th centuries show Cairo speckled with the towers of wooden oil rigs. The town was incorporated in 1895, during the height of the West Virginia oil boom, which supported the town’s two banks, two hotels and two oil and gas companies. There was also a post office, a planing mill, feed stores and sundry other concerns including an opera house that cost $1,500 to build. Not bad for a town that at its peak in 1910 counted a population of just 668.
The oil boom faded with World War i and the development of more productive and accessible wells. A world war later, a new industry came to Cairo: marbles. The local sand, it turned out, was ideal for glassmaking, and the natural gas to melt it was similarly plentiful. In 1946 Oris G. Hanlon built the Cairo Novelty Company, which produced distinctively colorful glass marbles known as West Virginia Swirls, among them a popular brand called Cairo Christmas. Just four years later though, a flood destroyed the factory, and today, marble collectors still come to scour the site in hopes of finding overlooked, original marbles. Likewise, a steady stream of hikers, cyclists and horse riders frequent the tranquil town while trekking the winding, scenic, 116-kilometer North Bend Rail Trail.
Iroquois and Esopus peoples once fished in the streams, hunted in the forested hills and farmed in what, shortly after the American Revolution ended in 1783, became a new home for some 200 New Englanders moving westward in quest of opportunities. Around this time, the Susquehanna Turnpike opened along the Catskill mountains on the west side of the Hudson River, presaging today’s tollways by charging for the movement of goods and people headed to and from upstate and western New York. The settlement that in 1808 became the first Cairo in the newly independent United States of America quickly profited from this prime location by offering the travelers hospitality and a variety of roadside services.
Local history maintains that it was businessman Ashbel Stanley who christened it Cairo in honor of its Egyptian namesake and in hopes the name would conjure beneficial associations. The population grew steadily over the 19th century amid an economy based on small family businesses in town and farms set amid the richly arable land of stream-fed valleys. In 1910, 1,841 heads were counted in the census; a century later there were 6,670, and projections for 2030 estimate there could be 9,000.
At about 200 kilometers due north from Times Square in New York City, Cairo’s rolling Catskill and Hudson Valley scenery proved a tonic to those city dwellers who could afford a getaway to the country and summer fun and entertainment with family and friends. Looking to supplement the income derived from agriculture, farmers began to accommodate boarders. This proved profitable, and it set off a boom in residents converting homes into boarding houses. Some gave up farming altogether to turn their land into full-fledged resorts. The peak of the town’s leisure economy came in the 1920s and 1930s, as reflected by the many idyllic postcards depicting scenic environs. Today, the town of Cairo sports five major resorts along with a host of small bed-and-breakfasts and vacation homes that lure 21st-century travelers with farm-to-table menus, personal hiking guides, forest yoga and—always for free—fresh, clean air.
In 1872 six men left Kentucky and joined the wave of settlers heading west to claim land on the plains of Nebraska. Pawnee tribes, pressured from the north by rival tribes and from the east by the settlers, had recently ceded eastern Nebraska and, increasingly destitute, were beginning to migrate south to reservations in Kansas. It was in this former Pawnee heartland, west of Omaha and not far from the new Grand Island and Wyoming Central Railroad line, the men from Kentucky found their land. Others came, too, and in 1886, town historians say a railroad survey engineer peered across the vast prairie and remarked that to him it looked like the Sahara, “so why not call it Cairo, only he pronounced it Karo, and that’s how it is known today,” notes the town’s centennial history, Cairo Community Heritage 1886-1986.
By 1900 Cairo had a population of 200, a school, a general store, two churches, two banks, a brick factory, a flour mill, a lumber yard, an ice plant, a saloon, stables, a confectionary, a modest opera house and a sprinkler wagon to water down the dirt streets when they got dusty. Which was often: One visitor noted that when it was incorporated as a village in 1892, Cairo was referred to as “an oasis in the bosom of the Great American Desert.”It was, the village history records, “a lady at the Lincoln Land Company” who built on the Egyptian name by labeling the original map with street names Egypt, Mecca, Medina, Nile, Suez, Thebes, Nubia and Said as well as Syria, Oasis, Harb and Berber. In the early 20th century, Cairo was flourishing enough to publish a modest handful of picture postcards. In 1910 the population had risen to 364. After World War ii it topped 500, and today stands just under 800.
To this day, it is the only Cairo in the us that continues to play on its namesake. It still proclaims itself “The Oasis of the Prairie,” and it welcomes traffic with a roadside silhouette of a pyramid and a nearly life-size metal sculpture of a camel, which stand alongside a baseball diamond and, beyond it, fields of corn, wheat and alfalfa.
The railroad tracks that prompted Cairo’s founding, owned now by the Burlington Northern Santa Fe line, clatter day and night with freight trains up to 200 boxcars long, ferrying coal, oil, lumber and, on Sunday mornings, aircraft fuselages. But no passenger trains stop in Cairo anymore.