The event, blending storytelling with live performance, was part of a heritage documentation project led by Ayat Abdel-Dayem, founder of the Garawan Centre for Culture and Art.
“I started documenting the wedding songs in 2021/2022 because I realized that the patterns of wedding celebrations are beginning to change in our village,” Ayat told Ahram Online. “Now, there are DJs instead of the women's live songs that I grew up with.”
Ayat feared the loss of a unique tradition—older women drumming while young girls sang along—a ritual at risk of fading as weddings increasingly imitate celebrations from other places.
“I realized that there is a heritage element that is on its way to perish due to the extreme changes in the wedding performances and the domination of the concept of mimicking instead of our authentic wedding celebrations,” she noted, clarifying that modern weddings have started to be a copy of other celebrations in other places.
After earning her diploma in Cultural Development, Ayat founded, in collaboration with the national centre for child culture, a cultural centre in Garawan in 2022.
As the village women desired a dedicated space, Ayat secured funding from Ashoka for an economic empowerment initiative, which included a small loom and training programs.
“But I believe that the economic goal is not attained unless we have a cultural intervention. To make a change, I joined a training program for storytelling… and this project allowed us to have seed funding to hold a storytelling workshop in my village, and so we did,” she explained.
The performance took place at the spacious yard of Bosat Cultural Centre. Bosat, housed in a renovated old villa in the heart of one of Cairo’s heritage districts, Hadayeq Al Qobba, was founded in 2009 as an NGO.
It has always focused on heritage and cultural activities that include book clubs, book fairs and touristic walks,” explained Doaa Alsharif, co-founder of Bosat.
The performance was the closing ceremony of Bosat’s summer book fair.
The Zaffa
The performance opened with a Zaffa, the traditional entrance of the bride. The celebration was done entirely by and for women. Two elderly ladies led the procession, beating a daraboka (traditional drum) and singing traditional wedding songs. Soon, the women sat in a semicircle, and each one stepped forward to tell a true story about the wedding traditions in Garawan village.
Henna invitations
The stories varied in their length and highlighted the fading and rooted traditions of the small, secluded village. One story revealed how Henna paste, which is commonly used by women to decorate their hands as a symbol of joy and festivity, was also a wedding invitation. Traditionally speaking, any bride in the neighbourhood would send off her relatives to distribute henna paste on the neighbours, and decorate their walls with their palms stained with henna. The henna paste is a wedding invitation to the wedding, which would take place the following day.
Gun fires
Another story recounted the end of one of the village’s worst traditions, which is the firing of guns as signs of joy and celebrations of weddings. The storyteller explained how her uncle was accidentally shot and almost lost his life. Due to such an accident, the villagers of Garawan vowed never to use gunfires in their weddings ever again.
Wedding Songs
The traditional wedding songs were not simply for joy. Sometimes they were used as songs of mockery to get back at the vicious future mother-in-law. “Oh, you Alley, used to be dead quiet, we are the ones who made you feel alive,”
Wedding Bakes
Weddings in villages are considered a community event, with women joining forces to bake wedding treats like biscuits, cookies, phyllo dough, and feteer (Egyptian pie). A storyteller explained, "The women in charge of the baking process are carefully chosen for their excellent skills and experience. They are usually elderly women."
The women of the village would contribute milk or margarine and a large serving plate with their name on it, and together, they would bake up to 100 kg of cookies.
The morning after the wedding, the trays would hold 50 cookies arranged in a pyramid (each row having three cookies), along with feteer and biscuits. The mothers of the bride and groom would give five cookies and a portion of pie to each family, a gift equivalent to the monetary wedding present, locally known as Noout, they had received.
The storyteller concluded, “I wish the idea would be duplicated in all of our neighbouring villages; this is my bigger dream.”
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