Journal

The oldest working Christian monastery in the world, under a mountain that Judaism, Christianity and Islam all hold sacred.

Ten shrines near Kumasi are all that survives of Asante architecture. They are also working places of worship, which changes how you visit.

A granite range in the far northeast, sacred for centuries, twice stormed by colonial troops, and still drawing pilgrims to its ancestor shrine.

Ten forest sites along 200km of the Kenyan coast, holding the remains of Mijikenda villages. Sacred ground first, and a visitor site only rarely.

Dry stone walls up to four and a half meters high, laid without mortar in the sixteenth century, in the hills northwest of Migori.

Egypt sits at the join of Africa and the Arab world, and the Nubian south carries a displacement story that the monuments above it are famous for.

A conservative, hospitable and very sociable country where dress, photography and the word for tipping are the three things visitors most often get wrong.

A lunar calendar, a Coptic one, a pharaonic spring festival everybody still keeps, and a sunrise that reaches the back of a temple twice a year.

Bean breakfasts, a national dish assembled from three starches at once, and a food culture built on feeding a lot of people well and cheaply.

Egypt has one decisive variable and it is heat. Everything else about when to come follows from how much of it you are willing to stand.

The capital of Egypt at its height, split across a river: temples for the living on the east bank, tombs for the dead on the west.

One of the oldest Islamic cities in the world, founded in the tenth century and at its height in the fourteenth, inside a city of twenty million.