[ALBSA-Info] Sterniperit e faraoneve...?!

[Agron Alibali]

FYROM's Pharaonic past

By Sonia Bakaric and James Hider 
Agence France-Presse 

OHRID, FYROM - In a tiny forge full of twisted scrap metal and salvaged bicycle parts, and under the gaze of a dusty photo of Tito, Ramiz Zemil struggles to keep alive a tradition his ancestors brought to the Balkans from Egypt more than 2,000 years ago. 
Zemil, 48, is a member of one of the most unexpected ethnic minorities that make up the Balkans' mixed and often conflicting nations: He and up to 15,000 others claim their descent from the ancient Egypt of the Pharaohs. 
Like the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia's (FYROM) ethnic Albanians, a slice of whom started a brief but explosive rebellion in February, the Egyptians are pushing for more official recognition. 
"The whole world has forgotten us, maybe even the Egyptians in Egypt," said Zemil, whose teenage son has chosen not to follow the family tradition of blacksmithing, hoping instead to become a doctor. 
According to Rubim Zemum, an ethnographer in this picturesque town on the shore of Ohrid, a large lake wedged between FYROM and Albania, the first historical traces of the Egyptians in the region appear in Herodotus's "Histories," written around 440 BC. 
"But they probably came here to mine metal in the 16th or 17th century BC," said the 30-year-old, who hopes to build a consciousness among his people, who over the millennia have taken on the languages and customs of Yugoslavs, Turks, and Albanians, Muslims and Christians. 
Officially, there are 3,307 Egyptians registered in FYROM, a hotchpotch nation of ethnic groups which is trying to avoid inter-community pressures that have recently threatened to rip the country apart. 
But Zemum says there are as many as 15,000 Egyptians across the country. 
Ten years ago, he founded the "Association of Egyptians in Macedonia" to make sure his people were not lost in the post-communist jockeying for position among ethnic groups across the region. 
He scored a point in 1991 by securing a separate column for Egyptians on census papers, and insists the process be repeated next month when a new population tally is put together. 
"If there is not a separate column we will call for a boycott of the census," he said, fearing that many of his fellow Egyptians will merely write down Muslim or Christian, depending on which part of the country they have settled in. 
But the task is not easy. While ethnic Albanians are specifically named in the constitution as a minority, the Egyptians are lumped in with other small groups under the heading "others." 
Devod Izetovski, president of the Party of the Democratic Movement of Egyptians in Macedonia, said Egyptians are the only group not represented in the council for minorities. 
A newspaper they launched in 1998, the Voice of the Egyptians, folded after one issue for want of funds. 
"We are loyal citizens, we pay our taxes, but we are second-class citizens. We have few rights in education or the workplace that allow us to survive as an ethnic group," said Izetovski. 
Egyptians fear the last vestiges of their heritage, eroded by millennia of isolation from a culture that itself has been totally transformed since they left, could be threatened if they do not mobilize. 
And they want to revive the links that once bound [the region] to Egypt. 
Zemum says it is no coincidence that Alexander the Great, the Macedonian king who built an empire stretching from Greece to India in the fourth century BC, based his capital at Alexandria in Egypt. 
And the 19th century ruler of Egypt, Mehmet Ali Pasha, who also came from the region, was most likely an ethnic Egyptian, Zemum says, although Albanians also claim him for their own. 
But after so much time, the vestiges of their culture are few and far between. A few words have survived from the times of the Pharaohs, such as their particular word for corn, "misir." The number three has also retained a mystical significance for the people who left the banks of the Nile for Lake Ohrid. 
Asked for more concrete examples, Zemum laughs that his community makes its baklava cakes in the shape of a pyramid. 
Tellingly, one of the few signs of this almost-erased culture is the watermark on the 10-dinar banknote. If held up to the light, a statue of the ancient Egyptian goddess Isis, found in a ruined temple in Skopje, is just visible. 
But a tradition of intermarrying as little as possible with other communities has left traces among the people themselves. 
Izetovski, the only member of the impoverished community to have visited Egypt, has a face strikingly similar to ancient Egyptian statues displayed in the British Museum.



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