Dig Days: An Egyptian artist in Paris and at home By Zahi Hawass I first met Farouk Hosni in 1973 when he was Egypt's cultural attaché in Paris, and we have been good friends ever since. He has always been in love with antiquities, and in the early years of our friendship we used to spend hours discussing various issues of our heritage. We had a mutual friend, Samir Gharib, and the three of us used to meet at the rest house at the Giza Pyramids where I lived at that time. One day when we were at the rest house, Farouk Hosni told us that he wanted to get married and that he wanted to meet an Egyptian girl from a nice family. So I arranged a lunch at the rest house with some of my colleagues. One of these was Samia El-Mallah, who was working with me in Giza. She was kind and beautiful and I thought she would be perfect for Farouk Hosni, but it turned out that Gharib was interested in her. One night Gharib came to see me at my apartment in Wadi Al-Nil Street and confided his feelings for El-Mallah to me. He said he wanted to marry her, and I told him that she was the perfect choice. I was staying alone in the apartment because I was studying for my exam to get my diploma from Cairo University. At one o'clock in the morning we were standing in front of my apartment, talking. Suddenly the wind blew the door shut behind us and we were locked out. I was shocked -- we were standing outside the locked apartment with no one to help us get inside, and I was only wearing my house clothes. After my initial panic, I had an idea. I told Gharib that I knew the chief of police at the Agouza police station. We took a taxi directly to the police station, and through the entire taxi ride I hoped my friend would be there and could help me -- but I also dreaded meeting him because I was extremely embarrassed to be going to the police station in the middle of the night in my house clothes. When we arrived we were lucky to find my friend, and I explained what had happened. He smiled and rang the bell for his assistant. He told his assistant to bring a thief who was in the cells, and who knew how to break into apartments. The assistant duly returned with the thief. So, with the prisoner and a soldier to guard him, Gharib and I left the station together and went back to my apartment. My apartment was on the top floor and I expected it would be difficult to get in. Within five minutes of arriving at my apartment, however, the thief had entered through the balcony and had opened the door. When Gharib and I told Hosni this story he laughed and laughed and laughed. While Hosni was working in Paris he would come back to Egypt periodically. One day when he was in Egypt he told me that he and Queen Farida, the wife of King Farouk, wanted to visit the Saqqara necropolis. On our drive to Saqqara Hosni's Peugeot hit a cat. Queen Farida insisted that we stop the car. She got out of the car and bent over to look at the cat. She touched the cat and had tears in her eyes. She insisted that we take the cat to the veterinary hospital. Her care for this cat touched my heart. I could see that she loved animals and that she was a compassionate lady. The whole day she was sad and she could not even eat lunch. I remember a time when Hosni, Gharib, our writer friend Mohamed Galal and I were at the rest house, and Hosni asked me if I had heard that some young people had vandalised the Citadel with paint, damaging one of our most beautiful Islamic monuments. He explained that because the late Egyptologist Ahmed Qadri, who was the head of the Egyptian Antiquities Authority, was his friend he could not talk to the press about this scandal. He said that the Citadel was damaged and most people did not know about this crime. When Hosni was in Paris he worked with Atef Sedqi, who at that time was the cultural counsellor at our embassy in Paris. While Hosni worked in Paris he did many important things to strengthen the cultural relationship between Egypt and France. He brought his love for Egyptian culture to the French people, and he started classes in Egyptian archaeology and the Arabic language. He became friends with many French Egyptologists such as Jean Leclant. With the support of Sedqi, he strengthened the political bond between Egypt and France. The excellent work that Hosni did in Paris will never be forgotten. To be continued...
