Wandering about the colonnades of Hatshepsut's magnificent temple in Luxor it is difficult to believe that two years ago 58 people were massacred here by Islamist extremists.
These days coachloads of tourists jostle for space among the colonnades and cluster about their guides, examining ancient reliefs without noticing the nicks from hundreds of bullets fired that day.
But while tourism in Egypt may have rebounded from the massacre, for those who live in the shadow of the now infamous temple the recovery is bittersweet. Although their incomes - devastated by the dramatic downturn in tourism - have been restored, they now face eviction from their homes and their traditional way of life.
The hundreds of brightly-coloured mud-brick houses in which they live form a chain of hamlets collectively known as the village of Gurna. People have lived here for hundreds of years, and it is thought that they originally used the tombs that cover the mountain for refuge in times of lawlessness. Later the Gurnawis, as the villagers are called, built traditional mud-brick houses over and beside the tombs.
However, according to government and antiquities officials, water seepage from these houses is destroying the area's ancient remains. They also contend that the houses prevent the excavation of other as-yet-undiscovered tombs in the hillside. Moreover, they say, the presence of the village destroys the "panorama" or view of the area.
"You can't have donkeys and cows in a world-class archaeological site," one high-ranking antiquities official exclaimed when questioned about the aesthetics of the village.
As a result, Gurna's 8,000 or so inhabitants are to be moved to a purpose-built desert settlement called New Tarif, some 3km north of the road to the Valley of the Kings. With a few exceptions, the old village houses will be demolished.
"Some of these houses will be kept as examples (of Gurna architecture) . . . but only the beautiful houses will stay in the panorama," Muhammed Nasr, former chief inspector of antiquities in the area, said.
For Gurnawis such as Ibrahim Raabia, a young man who lives in the shadow of Ramses II's famous mortuary temple, these statements are proof of official contempt for Gurna's past. "They say they care about culture and that anything over 100 years old is an antiquity, and yet they pull down 400-year-old houses and destroy our traditions," he said angrily.
Attempts to remove the village are not new. Back in the 1940s a talented young architect named Hassan Fathy was hired by the Department of Antiquities to design and build a new village for the inhabitants of Gurna. Fathy's ideas of letting the poor build their own housing, using mud-brick, as peasants had been doing for thousands of years, were to be implemented.
But the majority of the villagers refused to move, partly because they did not want to leave the environs of the tombs and tourists that were providing them with a living, but also, according to Fathy, because of official attitudes towards them.
"I have often heard responsible officials refer to the peasants as sons of dogs and say that the only way to handle them is to build them houses of any sort and bulldoze the old ones," he wrote.
Many Gurnawis say the same attitude prevails today. They say the two-bedroom concrete flats built for them by the government are inappropriate for their extended families and are a deliberate attempt to force them into an alien lifestyle.
"If I include my brothers and their families and my parents, there are 20 people in my household," said Tayer Muhammed Tayer, a farmer who lives in Gurna's southernmost hamlet, Gurnat Marai. "If they gave me a house the same size as the house I have now, I'd go tomorrow. But otherwise, how can I leave? Where would we all sleep?"
In an effort to force people out the state has made life difficult for the Gurnawis. The entire area has been under a construction ban since 1981, when a presidential decree turned it into an historical preservation area. Water is also a problem. The presence of the tombs means that piped water is not permitted, so villagers have to bring their supplies up the hill in small tanks pulled by donkeys.
Still, most Gurnawis refuse to budge. This was underlined in January 1998, just two months after the Hatshepsut massacre, when a newly-appointed governor tried to remove some illegal new buildings and sparked a riot that left four dead and 20 others wounded.
Since then there have been faint signs of official change on Gurna. In November 1998 UNESCO's World Heritage Committee called on the Egyptian government to rethink its policy of relocating the villagers. More recently, the director of Egypt's Supreme Council for Antiquities, Dr Gaballah Ali Gaballah, has recognised that moving the estimated 10,000 villagers is simply not feasible financially.
The cost would be about $1.31 million, he said, "and nobody is going to put up that kind of money."
Last August he proposed that a survey be carried out in the area and only houses found to have a direct negative effect on the monuments be moved. However, he was roundly criticised for his ideas in the Cairo press and he is likely to retire from his post in the spring.
In the meantime, the municipality of Luxor continues to remove families under whatever pretext it can and the Gurnawis remain defiant. "I'm not going to move from here," Ibrahim Raabia said. "I'm going to fight to the death."