Who we are

The church traces its history to Mark the Evangelist, who preached in Alexandria around AD 43. The See of St Mark stood beside Rome and Antioch as one of the great centres of ancient Christianity.

At Nicaea, Constantinople and Ephesus the patriarchs of Alexandria defended orthodoxy. After the Council of Chalcedon (451) the Coptic Church held to the teaching formulated by Cyril: Christ has one incarnate nature out of the divine and the human — fully divine and fully human, without mingling, without change, without division and without separation.

The church celebrates seven sacraments: baptism, chrismation, the Eucharist, repentance and confession, the anointing of the sick, marriage, and holy orders.

Coptic is the final stage of ancient Egyptian. It is written in a Greek alphabet extended by seven demotic letters for sounds Greek does not have.

It is still prayed and sung in the liturgy. Its decipherment — not least by Jean-François Champollion — was a key to modern Egyptology.

The Coptic liturgy is sung entirely by voice, accompanied only by cymbals and triangle. The repertoire runs to some 1,048 hymns, each assigned precisely to a feast, a fast or a rite.

For centuries this inheritance was handed on by memory alone, without notation. Only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries did cantors and musicologists begin to record it systematically.

The Coptic era begins with the accession of Diocletian in AD 284 — the Calendar of the Martyrs. The year has twelve months of thirty days and a short thirteenth month.

More than 210 days of the year are fast days, kept by abstaining from all animal products — as ascetic practice, as repentance, and as a deliberate ordering of the body beneath the spirit.