Egypt’s pottery village explores with art in yearly festival
Egypt’s celebrated pottery center, the village of Tunis, holds an annual art festival that now features crafts from calligraphy to wood carving.
CAIRO — “It felt like a diverse gallery stretched throughout an entire town — just wonderful,” exclaimed Amal Henri, who attended the eighth annual Tunis Pottery and Handcrafts Festival, held in early November.
Local and foreign tourists, many with a taste for pottery and other handcrafts, flock every year to Tunis, a small, picturesque village in Egypt’s Faiyum governorate. Today, the village is one of the stopping points of most tours in Egypt, but a mere 50 years ago, it was an untouched hamlet. In 1980s, Swiss potter Evelyn Porret opened her studio there and quickly turned it to a pottery school, the first step toward turning the village into a center for pottery and ceramics.
