Photo credit: Lydia Yousief
Description: the cashier stand at L&E Market in Millwood, South Nashville before the Feast of Resurrection 2021.
About the archive
In the summer of 2021, Elmahaba received an Opportunity Grant of $2,500 from Humanities Tennessee to launch this project. With that grant, we hired a photographer and mapper, and paid for a subscription of Omeka for the next three years to house our map.
We started simply with the idea to map 30 Coptic spaces in Nashville and the surrounding area. Keria, our photographer, ended up photographing over 40 spaces excluding the Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant churches, and Mirette mapped those locations with descriptions. Both Nashville life-long residents from the Coptic community, Keria Nashed and Mirette Henin detailed a history of our people in Nashville.
In December 2021, we received a year-long grant from Humanities Tennessee through SHARP to continue this work and maintain this oral history project for 2022–not only in maintaining and adding to the Omeka, but also in training young Coptic individuals in Nashville to take up oral history through small stipends for interns.
In 2024, Elmahaba Center did joint workshops with the Arab American National Museum on oral history archiving and material keeping and gathering.
Now, in 2026, through a generous donation from the Wallace Foundation through the Center for Arab American Philanthropy, we have revived the project as a digital archive with plans to make it a “pop up archive” in January 2027 in partnership with Random Sample.
How to Cite This Work
This digital archive is a mere morsel of the decades of collecting, listening, sharing, collaborating, and building on analysis and theory and stories. There are still archival materials like newspapers, audios, interviews, livestreams, dates for the timeline, social media posts and discourse, locations that have been erased and locations that have been remade—that are all not here yet.
Your proper citing of this work helps fuel that work.
We know that many students, teachers, and community members in general have access to this public resource through the generous underpaid labor of many women of color, whether mentioned here or not, and that all those eyes and hearts can continue to help the community share our story.
So we ask that you properly cite this as a project of Elmahaba Center: A Coptic Nashville Archive (established 2021).
To invite either Keria Nashed or Lydia Yousief to speak to a class or organization or group, please contact us with as much information on the date/time and specificity of topics to cover: lydia@elmahabacenter.org
About Elmahaba
Elmahaba Center is the only Egyptian-led, Arab-based organization in Nashville, Tennessee. Elmahaba Center launched in 2019 to address the lack of resources and recognition to the Arabic-speaking communities in particular for our labor in building this city for tourists and more residents. We bring together direct service with advocacy and culture; we believe that honoring culture builds community which offers care.
As part of our cultural work, Elmahaba launched our oral history project in 2021 through a grant from Humanities Tennessee. Our first executive director and one of the founders, Lydia Yousief, is also a trained oral historian.
To learn more about our work and history, explore our website.
Finally, there is a lot of information that we’ve written about concerning the Coptic or Egyptian community of Nashville that is published by others or by ourselves. We invite you to read on via our Publications page on our main Elmahaba website. Please note that the majority of those publications center the organization’s work, which is interwoven into the history of the community served.
Photo credit: Lydia Yousief
Description: Elmahaba Center’s table at the Culture Fest at Centennial Park in Midtown in October 2019
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