Technicians paint replicas of Ancient Egyptian busts of Queen Nefertiti being fabricated at the Egyptian government’s Konouz factory reproducing replicas of Ancient Egyptian items.
Before the pandemic, “we had about 15 workers – compared to five today,” he said, noting that even the remaining staff were not full-time.Hundreds of small business owners and artisans have been forced to mothball much of their activity, choked by cancelled flights and movement restrictions around the world.
Around 500,000 have flown in monthly since April this year, more than double the number in January and up from an average of just 200,000 tourists per month in 2020.On the other side of town, in the narrow and labyrinthine alleys of Khan el-Khalili in Islamic Cairo, tourist Caroline Bucher is on the hunt for “locally made” products to bring back home to her native Dominican Republic.
The factory, named Konouz , produces furniture, statuettes and paintings that retrace four major periods of Egyptian heritage: Pharaonic, Greco-Roman, Coptic and Islamic.