Tuesday, October 4, 2016

Egyptian properties on Greek islands: The full story of Egyptian state property on the Greek island of Thassos

 An official Egyptian delegation arrived in Athens on 2 October for a meeting with Greek officials for preliminary talks on a water demarcation agreement between Egypt and Greece.


An Egyptian source in Athens told Ahram Online that this is neither the first nor necessarily the conclusive meeting on “the ongoing Egyptian-Greek discussion on demarking water borders in the Mediterranean between the two countries.”

According to the source, the meeting should provide Cairo officials with an elementary assessment of a demarcation proposal submitted by the Greek side and which will be discussed in Cairo on 9 October during an Egyptian-Greek summit. The news was confirmed by a government source in Cairo.

  • “This is one of many issues that Egypt and Greek have to discuss, [including] the borders, the natural gas fields in the Mediterranean and the Egyptian properties on Greek islands,” the source said.

A delegation from Egypt’s Ministry of Religious Endowments left for Greece on 26 September to inspect Egyptian properties owned by the ministry on two Greek islands dating back to the rule of Mohamed Ali under the Ottoman Empire.

These properties have been subject to controversy as an official in the ministry had complained about the failure of Greece to honour Egyptian legal and financial rights regarding these properties.

Prominent historian Khaled Fahmy explained that it was in the 19th century that Egypt’s ruler at the time, Mohamed Ali, first acquired Egyptian properties on the island of Thassos.

“Mohamed Ali, who was born in Kavala, a mainland city opposite the Aegean Sea island, had asked the Ottoman sultan to give him the land there so that he would establish a soup kitchen and have it run as a charity; this is what waqf is about,” Fahmy said.

The Ottomans had incorporated Thassos into their empire during the second half of the 15th century.
Egypt also had properties in Kavala dating back to the 19th century.

Egypt’s former ambassador to Greece, Maguida Chahine, explained that since the mid-1990s, Egypt had rented the largest building on Thassos to a Greek entrepreneur “who turned it into a very impressive hotel and who had been promptly paying the due rent.”

Fahmy agreed that Anna Missirian, “also from Kavala, had done exemplary work with the restoration of Eimarat,” the original large building of the soup kitchen that was established by Mohamed Ali in the 19th century and which was later enlarged and annexed with extra buildings that hosted those providing the charitable services.

And according to Chahine, the “quality of work that was done in the restoration of this building had been the answer to its preservation because otherwise it could have been so rundown, as the case is with some other waqf properties” that are not carefully attended to.

Chahine insisted that “there is no need to confuse the files – not with a country like Greece that has always been exceptionally friendly with Egypt and supportive of all basic Arab rights especially the Palestinian cause.”

Chahine argued that it would not be difficult at all for Cairo and Athens to settle mutually consensual agreements on the matters of waqf administration, water demarcation or the management of gas fields that are have been discovered in the eastern Mediterranean........http://english.ahram.org.eg/News/244732.aspx
 4/10/16
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