Faras
Town on the Nile in Lower Nubia, the ancient Pachoras, in the medieval kingdom of Nobadia. Its buried cathedral and wall paintings were excavated before the site was flooded by the Aswan High Dam; paintings from it are now in the National Museum in Warsaw.
Faras lay on the Nile in the far north of what is now Sudan. The National Museum in Warsaw, which holds paintings from it, describes it as a large urban centre of the medieval kingdom of Nobadia, known as Pachoras when its first cathedral was built in the seventh century, and says that Polish archaeologists working in the campaign to save the monuments of Nubia found the cathedral of the eighth century there before the valley was flooded (Faras Gallery, National Museum in Warsaw). John of Ephesus, who tells of the conversion of the Nobadae, does not name their king’s residence in the chapters cited in the Conversion of the Nubian Kingdoms.
What happened here
- about AD 543 to AD 580, estimated dateThe Conversion of the Nubian Kingdoms
John of Ephesus tells how the empress Theodora sent the priest Julian to the Nobadae on the Nile south of Egypt ahead of her husband’s envoys, so that they were baptised into the church that rejected Chalcedon, and how the bishop Longinus later baptised the king of Alodia.