PERHAPS the largest crowd ever to visit the village of Gurna on Luxor’s West Bank assembled early last December to watch an over-elaborate ceremony taking place on a hill opposite the village. Local officials brought in two busloads of journalists to witness the proceedings, which began with groups of school children in Pharaonic dress performing to the beat of drums. Once the children were done, visiting mayors, governors and council heads gave speech after speech to the attentive television cameras.

The occasion: The ceremonial destruction of the village of Gurna in what officials promised would be the next-to-last step toward the relocation of its residents to a new, government-built settlement.

While most of the assembled dignitaries made mention of the need to improve the lives of Gurna residents, all focused on the long-awaited razing of Gurna village, the second such attempt in the last decade and part of a bid to conserve antiquities beneath local houses. Between the dignitaries and the village was a row of brightly painted construction vehicles. Across the road in Gurna itself, a different group was on a different hill: These were the villagers themselves, separated from the dignitaries by rows of police.

Theirs was a generally less enthusiastic reaction. “Those girls over there,” the man I was standing next to told me, “they are not from Gurna. They brought them in from Luxor,” he insisted.

It felt much more like a council of war than an archaeological undertaking, one foreign correspondent remarked.

As the ceremony drew to a close, a select few residents of Gurna were handed deeds to homes in New Gurna at Al-Taref, the LE 180 million, government-built city three kilometers northeast of old Gurna, offered as a replacement to the locals.

Then came the destruction crews: Four homes were symbolically reduced to rubble as the cameras flashed. Reactions to the demolition were mixed. As one man screamed at the crews, scores of people seemingly resigned to their fate sat and watched him with as much interest as the destruction. A group of women was chasing down every person they saw with a camera or a notebook and, in broken English, proceeded to tell anyone who would listen how excited they were about the move.

Their inexhaustible level of enthusiasm, and their over-eagerness to share their excitement with all and sundry, led many of the assembled members of the press to speculate about how much this cheerleading squad had cost the local government.

Given Egypt’s historically spotty track-record on relocation projects, little could we have known then that the ambitious project to raze the rest of the village and relocate its residents could actually turn out to be a good thing for many of the Gurnawis. Our next visit, just before press time and within the project’s scheduled six weeks time frame for completion, was equally surprising as we saw many of the residents happy and snug in their new accommodations.

On our first visit, Gurnawis were eager to show us the cracked walls and the deteriorating state of the unbaked bricks as well as the lack of any utilities in their village. One old woman ushered us into a one-room house she shared with her five daughters. The house belonged to a man who had been helping them since her husband died, and she was worried that she wouldn’t get a home in New Gurna. Despite her concerns, she wanted to move.

The government is tearing Gurna down to preserve some 950 tombs it believes to be buried beneath the village.

“Look at this,” she said gesturing around the small room. “We have no services, no water, no toilet, and this place is very small.” Running water is not allowed anywhere in Gurna because of fears that it could damage the ancient tombs beneath the homes.

And though many residents expressed concerns that moving to the new village would remove them from their livelihoods, she wasn’t worried. “What work?” she asked. “We have no living here. My daughters can only sometimes get work by the day, but this is all.”

At this point the eldest daughter, who wasn’t happy that her mother was speaking to us at all, began screaming at her mother to be quiet. “I am only telling them the truth,” the mother replied defensively as we left.

Many others were less enthusiastic about the new city. Abdullah Hassan explained that he owned four houses in Gurna, but claimed the government was only offering him one in the new village. “The new house is smaller than any one of my homes here,” he alleged. “How can they take four houses, give me one and call this fair?”

Saieed, who was busy working in his family’s alabaster shop, the New Mona Lisa, also felt slighted by the move. “They took my home and they are giving me 150 square meters of desert. What am I supposed to do with that? They are not going to help me build a house. The government must think we are very rich people.”

The government is tearing Gurna down to preserve some 950 tombs it believes to be buried beneath the village.

His brother, who goes by the improbable nickname Shaggy, pointed out that it’s not what is being offered to the Gurnawis that’s the problem. “Our life is here,” he said. “It isn’t a problem with the new homes or the new services. It is a problem with our lives. Our life is here. I have seen the new city. It’s nice, but that’s not the point, these are our homes.”

Over in New Gurna that day, the identical single-story duplexes sitting in impossibly neat rows couldn’t be further removed from the chaotic collection of houses and the twisting alleys of Gurna. Separating the new village from the main street are large open fields of grass. Paved roads and streetlights complete the contrast.

Matching the symbolic four demolished houses, four of the new houses were furnished, complete with residents. Families invited in the curious to show them brand-new furniture, still in its plastic wrapping. The refrigerator in the center of one room still had the safety seal holding the door closed.

In the old village of Gurna, just walking too near a house could result in an invitation to tea. The lack of the ubiquitous drink was puzzling until a quick tour of the house revealed that the water was not turned on, nor was there electricity to boil the water.

One block in from the finished row facing the street, the new homes were far from finished. The roads weren’t paved. Manhole covers lay open, exposing sewage and water lines not yet connected. Even further back, the promised houses were still wooden forms waiting for concrete.

Mohamed Allouba Even with the walls of their homes torn down, many residents of Gorna are reluctant to move to the new settlement.

Across the street, two schools, a community center and a police station all looked far from completion. Back then in December, it seemed the government’s goal of moving all of the Gurnawis within six weeks would have to be scaled back and we were ready to return in January to write the second chapter — the next chapter, we expected, in a spotty history of relocation that stretches back at least as far as the Nubians in the 1960s.

There are as many versions of Gurna’s history as there are people to tell it. According to the Ministry of Culture’s Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), the original residents of Gurna were people fleeing the French invasion during the early 1800s. A century later, following a surge of interest in Egyptology, people moved en masse to stake claims above the tombs. Archaeologists clamored to purchase the “rights” to excavate the treasures below, while travelers stopped in to make purchases.

The SCA’s characterization of the Gurnawis as grave robbers and squatters is nothing new. In fact, they’ve certainly been called worse. The Gurnawis suffered from an image problem centuries before the SCA even existed.

At some point in the sixteenth century, a merchant known only as the Anonymous Venetian traveled to Luxor and brought back to Europe the first description of the city since the ancient Greeks. His is the first known reference to the Gurnawis, and it’s hardly a flattering one. According to his account, they made a “habit of robbing and murdering unprotected travelers, fellow Bedouin and other villagers without distinction.”

Cache Seel Some residents of New Gurna have found the indoor plumbing and other amenities make it a better place to live.

The source of these accusations was his boat captain, widely believed to have been a Cairene. The Anonymous Venetian, terrified by his captain’s stories, never set foot on the West Bank to see for himself.

Following the publishing of the Venetian’s accounts and sketches, the monuments and temples of Upper Egypt captured the imaginations of Europeans, and scores of European travelers made the long journey to see ancient Thebes. These travelers also left behind memoirs of their voyages, few of which remembered the Gurnawis much more fondly.

The French naturalist Charles Sonnini wrote that Gurna was “the resort of the most formidable banditti the meanest, the most frightful, and most miserable place in appearance I ever beheld.” His impressions seem to have been pre-formed by discussions with Turkish officials long before he met the Gurnawis and his account quickly becomes disjointed. Despite continually referring to them as ‘banditti,’ when Sonnini buys artifacts from them, he says they, “displayed as much integrity and fairness as if they had been the most honest people in the world.”

The references to the Gurnawis as ‘bandits’ and ‘outlaws’ are too numerous to list. In most of these cases, a government official is cited as the source of dire warnings to the traveler.

Friction between the Gurnawis and the government, it seems, is also hardly new.

The Gurnawis, of course, paint a much different picture of themselves. Their history on the hillside long predates the SCA’s estimates, they claim, explaining that their people moved there for the same reason the ancients built their tombs in the area. (The hills of Gurna are above the reaches of even the highest Nile flood and their freestanding position makes them immune from the flashfloods, which threaten much of the surrounding area. The tombs were ready-made housing, and over time these primitive shelters expanded and became Gurna village.)

Archaeological records are scant in an area where dried mud bricks are the most common building material, but the Gurnawis point to several factors to refute accusations that they are newly arrived squatters. The earliest drawings of Gurna show it centered around the ruins of a Coptic church. Although Gurna has some Coptic residents, the vast majority are Muslim; the placing of a church in such a prominent location means it was almost certainly built many centuries before, when the village was primarily Christian. The recent discovery of a sixth century Coptic manuscript in the area also suggests a much longer history than some have claimed.

Robert Hay was a Scotsman who spent 10 years in Egypt from 1824 to 1834. He created what was up to that point the most detailed and extensive collection of drawings of Egypt’s antiquities. Much of his time in Luxor was spent on the West Bank. While documenting the prominent temples and tombs such as Medinat Habu and Queen Hatshepsut’s Mortuary Temple, he also included current sketches and descriptions of the Theban Necropolis, known as Gurna to its residents, where he was staying at the time, living in a tomb that he called the “standard housing for villagers and visitors alike.”

In many ways, Dr. Zahi Hawass was the man behind the move of the Gurnawis. In an exclusive interview from the East Coast of the United States last month, where he was recovering from eye surgery, the SCA chief says he doesn’t doubt there has long been limited habitation in the area, but he claims, “Almost all of these people came to this area in the 1920s when there began to be large expeditions. The archaeologists hired people from nearby villages with no place to live and they made homes in the tombs.”

Since coming to office in 2002, Hawass has turned his obsession with the preservation of Egypt’s priceless antiquities (and the recovery of pieces spirited out of the country) into a national mission.

While the government’s claim that the Gurnawis are recently arrived squatters is open to debate, even the Gurnawis admit they have a history of looting antiquities. “But this was all in the past,” Shaggy says. “Now we make our living from the tourists who come to see the tombs and the antiques. We would have to be very stupid to steal these things.”

Today, he claims, the Gurnawis act as the guardians of the tombs. “If the people are gone from here, then people will come and rob the tombs.”

The Gurnawis have also been accused of being a nuisance to tourists, a nonsensical claim according to Shaggy. “We have had tourists rent homes and live here for years because they like the people here. This will never happen in the new village.”

Right next to Gurna is the Mortuary Temple of Queen Hatshepsut. “In 1997, when the terrorists attacked the tourists, it was people from Gurna who helped save the tourists,” Shaggy claims. “Gurna is super friendly for tourists. There are no hassles here.”

Hawass is skeptical, saying it’s not only the looting that is the problem: Having humans and animals living in tombs is even more of a threat to whatever antiquities may remain. “Terrible damage has been done to the tombs of Gurna,” he told the cameras at the December ceremony. “The fact that archaeology is regaining its rights here is the dream of my life.”

“If you dig anywhere in Egypt, you’ll find something,” Azza Shawarby, national project director of the recently formed Egyptian Antiquities Information System (EAIS), once told me. With a smile she added, “Even if you fall down, you will probably land on an artifact.”

So with millions of Egyptians living on top of ancient monuments, the question is: Why is Gurna being singled out?

“There are 950 tombs under these houses,” Dr. Samir Farag, the governor of Luxor, tells me. “We don’t even know what we have. This decision was based on the importance of the site.”

For centuries, the man of the house would go “downstairs” in hard times and return with an artifact to sell. It was less of a get-rich-quick scheme than it was a means of survival. “Almost all of the tombs will certainly be in very bad condition,” Hawass tells me over the phone. “But I think as we dig under these houses we will find at least 25 lost tombs from ancient Thebes. We don’t really know what’s hidden underneath these houses. But I’m sure though that our excavations will reveal great [finds].”

Back in Saieed’s alabaster shop in December, he explains that it’s not so much what the government has promised them in compensation for moving as the likelihood that they will ever get it that mostly disturbs him. “They are pushing us to leave, but they have given us nothing yet.”

“I think they are lying. They came and spoke with us and promised us all these things, but I have seen the new city,” Shaggy adds.

“They told us the new house would be 180 [square] meters, but it’s only 130. We have a lot of people here; they told us about 3,200 flats but there are only 570,” Shaggy says.

The Gurnawis had good reason to be skeptical. All of the relocation projects in Egypt’s recent history have been marked by broken promises. Ignoring the Cairo-area debacles of the 1990s, whole libraries could be filled with books and essays on the displacement of the Nubians. Depending on whose figures you believe, either 50,000 or several hundred thousand Nubians were relocated more than 40 years ago to make way for the Aswan Dam and Lake Nasser. Many are still fighting to get the compensation promised to them. Many more have given up.

In May 2004, Hassan Abdullah, a Nubian man from Qustul, told Egypt Today about the disparity between what was promised and what was delivered. “You see, we were shocked because the authorities who visited our villages from Cairo told us that we were moving to a better place. They showed us models of our new homes. But the reality was completely different.”

The mood was festive on the day they were moved, he said, but when the Nubians finally saw their destination, “Everyone became quiet, very quiet. We were shocked by what we saw,” Abdullah recalled.

Not only was the promised compensation much less than promised, but nearly half a century later 75 percent of the Nubian diaspora have not received any compensation at all. Today’s Nubians now refer to themselves as Al-Mankubeen, the ill-fated ones.

The Gurnawis aren’t the only ones to draw a parallel between themselves and the Nubians. Ironically, Governor Farag also mentioned it in his speech at the ceremony: “Three thousand five hundred families will leave for a better life. It’s the most important resettlement operation since the rescue of Abu Simbel in Nubia some 40 years ago.”

This isn’t the first time the government has tried to move the Gurnawis. Relocation efforts date back at least 100 years, and given the well-documented mutual dislike between the Gurnawis and respective governments, probably go back even further.

In 1945, an Egyptian architect named Hassan Fathy built a new village for the residents of Gurna. The idea and the funding came from the Department of Antiquities, which had been trying (rather unsuccessfully) to dislodge the Gurnawis for the previous 50 years.

Fathy was chosen for the project because of his novel ideas on solving the housing problems in Egypt, and it was the perfect opportunity to test his theories. The project became his most famous after he wrote a book about it called Architecture for the Poor, which quickly gained international recognition. The book is largely a story of good intentions and failure. Today, thanks to destructive groundwater and abandonment, little is left of Hassan Fathy’s village save a mosque and parts of the original houses.

In the early 1990s, the government decided to give it another shot, and studies and planning began in 1992. Archaeologist Caroline Simpson arrived in Egypt in 1994 and has spent most of her time since then living in and documenting Gurna. She was there, in fact, when the government last tried to move the Gurnawis in 1997.

Then, as before, she says, the promises didn’t live up to the reality either.

“A leaflet was part of the consultation exercise for the planned relocation of Gurna in the mid-1990s,” she described in a series of lectures given at the American Research Center in 2000. “It shows the new village sensitively planned, with respect for local social structures and needs. This was what many local people agreed to and they keep these leaflets locked safely in their cupboards to prove it. But it never happened. What was built instead was barracks-type accommodation on the one hand, and a toy-town nonsense piece of corruption on the other.”

The end result of this failed attempt was four dead Gurnawis and zero Gurnawis moved. (There are competing accounts of how the four died: While some claim they were relocated visitors who died in a flash flood, others say they were killed in demonstrations against the move. Either way, today’s Gurnawis aren’t interested in rehashing the story.)

The current relocation project has implications for much more of the population of Luxor than simply the Gurnawis. Indeed, it is the first phase of a plan to turn the city into what Farag calls “a living museum.”

The next phases of the project are going to take place inside Luxor city limits. In the heyday of ancient Thebes, a road connected the temples of Luxor and Karnak. The road, lined with an estimated 1,200 sphinxes, was of enormous religious significance to the ancients. Over the millennia, as ancient Thebes transformed itself into modern Luxor, the road was swallowed by new residents for whom it held no significance.

Today, numerous roads cross the ancient path and tens of thousands of people live in hundreds of buildings along it. The planned restoration of the three kilometer-long, 80 meter wide “Sphinx Avenue” will demand the expropriation of more than 100,000 square meters of residential land in Downtown Luxor.

The residents of this area have been promised the same deal as the Gurnawis. Their new village has been planned by and is being built by the same people. The fate of the Gurnawis will be theirs.

When we went back to the original Gurna in mid-January, a few of the houses were still standing, but the majority had come down. The freshly painted construction vehicles were gone and men with picks and baskets were chipping away at the remaining buildings.

Most of the residents had gone, too. Of those who remained, some had houses left and some didn’t. Mahmoud Al-Atayat is one of the many residents chasing away the cold morning air with a fire made from scavenged wood from the destroyed houses.

“Come look, I will show you,” Al-Atayat says. He leads me to a small alabaster workshop behind the stores. Inside, five people are sitting on the floor and an old man he tells me is his father is sleeping on the only piece of furniture.

“My old home is destroyed,” he begins. “Why haven’t they opened the new one? They haven’t opened the new homes for us but they tore down my old home,” he complains, becoming more irate with every word. “This is not a home, this is my workshop,” he exclaims. “Now I can’t even work. They have now taken everything.”

Outside the workshop sits a family even less fortunate than Al-Atayat’s. A scattered mess of furniture and boxes is where Abdu Hassan and his family spent last night. The members of the family range in age from a baby only a few months old to the very elderly.

“We are all living outside right now,” Hassan says as he stokes his fire. “Five days ago they made me bring my stuff outside. They [tore down] my house before they gave me a new one. How can I live out here?” he asks, shaking his head. “The new house for us is ready,” he alleges. “But they won’t give me the key. It is very cold here at night.”

As if on cue, a bulldozer rolls past as we talk. One of the younger men in the group begins yelling at the man who appears to be the foreman. “My grandmother has slept outside for three days. Please, we want the truth.”

“This man is from the government,” he says, back turned toward us. “They always say, ‘Someone will come tonight.’ But no one will come.”

Saieed and Shaggy are also still in Gurna. “Probably 70 percent of the people are in the new village, maybe more,” Shaggy says. “Most of the people still here are just waiting, only a few are resisting. The police will force them to move. They [the police] are waiting right now, but soon they will stop waiting.”

Their houses are still standing. “We don’t know what will happen. They told us we have two weeks, but we don’t have new houses yet. Many of the new houses are not built yet. The schools they promised are not finished either. I think it will take another two years before they are finished,” Shaggy surmises.

But over in New Gurna, the city has taken on a new appearance since our last visit. It is still unfinished, but most of the houses are full. Children playing in the streets make the uniform houses seem much less sterile. Playgrounds are being set up on the grassy fields — fields a truck is busy watering as we pull up.

Across the road, just as we had been told, the schools and the community center are still far from complete. It seems that the relationship between the Gurnawis and the government hasn’t improved over the course of the move, as the only finished building on the other side of the street is the new police station.

Wandering along the unpaved roads between the houses, we come across a man playing with a child in front of one of the houses. He introduces himself simply as Tayeb, and invites us in to see his house. The plastic-covered couches from the previous visit are gone. In their place are a collection of rugs and furniture that have obviously been collected over time, making it feel much more like a home than the prepackaged houses that had been on display.

“No, no, no,” he answers to the first question. “Living here is much better. We were living with no water and no toilet. This is much nicer. No, there are only five people including me living in this house,” he says when we tell him that many of the people we’d met in December claimed the houses in the new village were overcrowded. “I have heard this happened to some people, but those are the people who have not come yet.”

He waves his arm to encompass all of New Gurna. “No one here is living like that.”

There is an office people can go to, we find out, to resolve complaints and sort out grievances. In subsequent conversations with the residents of New Gurna, we’re told that it’s only a small unfortunate minority who are still stuck in Gurna, victims of Egypt’s legendary bureaucracy.

By this time it’s almost midday. What about all of the children in the street? When will they finish a school for them, we wonder.

“I think this school will be finished next year,” Tayeb says, gesturing at the building across the street. “But all of the children are in school.”

Then why aren’t they in school at midday, we ask.

This week is a holiday, he explains. “There is a school very close. The younger children go by collective car. But the older ones, they can walk if they choose. It’s not far at all. And next year,” he shrugs and points back across the street, “they will go to this one.”

Hawass later tells us he never would have moved the Gurnawis had their interests not been taken into account. “We were always working for these people. Now they can have a hot shower. Many of these people have never even had a shower in their life. It is impossible to say their life is not better.”  et