Zeitoun — the lights over St Mary's church, 1968–1971

OVERVIEW

Our Lady of Zeitoun is a mass Marian apparition reported over St Mary's Coptic Church in the Zeitoun district of Cairo from 2 April 1968 for about three years. Coptic tradition holds that Zeitoun is near one of the places the Holy Family stayed during the flight into Egypt.

HISTORY

On the evening of 2 April 1968 two Muslim bus mechanics saw a woman in white on the church roof; taking her for a nun about to jump, they shouted 'don't jump!' and called the police, who told the gathering crowd it was a reflection of the street lamps. A church custodian suggested it was the Virgin. It recurred on 9 April and then up to two or three times a week until 1971. Pope Kyrillos VI's committee under Bishop Gregorios investigated and he confirmed the apparitions on 4 May 1968; the Ministry of Tourism printed pamphlets and charged admission near the church; President Nasser was said to have seen it. Police found no device within fifteen miles that could project an image. On 19 May 1968, as similar reports spread, 15 people were trampled to death in a stampede at the Archangel Michael church in Shubra.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

The anthropologist Cynthia Nelson of the American University in Cairo, the only secular English-language eyewitness, visited over five months and saw only 'intermittent flashes of light' she took for headlights and a glow through the palm trees — though she conceded the source was a mystery, since the streetlights round the church had been disconnected. Skeptics (Joe Nickell, Robert Todd Carroll, Bartholomew and Goode) point to crowd expectation and mass suggestion; Sadiq Jalal al-Azm and the historian Ahmad Shalaby argued the state amplified it after the 1967 defeat; Muhammad al-Ghazali went and saw nothing. The best-known photographs show signs of compositing. Derr and Persinger proposed earthquake lights. A 1986 survey of 111 Coptic witnesses found 90% of respondents describing a human figure.

VISITING

St Mary's Coptic Church, Zeitoun, Cairo; the pin marks the Zeitoun district, not the church itself. Visiting arrangements are not recorded in the source.