On the night of 2 April 1968 Muslim workmen at a garage across from the Coptic Orthodox church of St. Mary in Zeitoun saw a woman in white on the roof and, thinking she meant to jump, called for help. She did not jump; she bowed to the crowd, and vanished. Over the following three years the figure returned dozens of times, always at night, sometimes for hours — a form of light in the shape of a woman, moving on the domes, bowing, at times with birds of light about her — and was seen by crowds that reached, on some nights, a quarter of a million people, and captured by press photographers.
The Coptic Orthodox Pope Kyrillos VI appointed a commission and on 4 May 1968 declared the apparitions authentic; the Coptic Catholic Patriarch, Cardinal Stephanos I Sidarouss, affirmed the same for his own faithful, saying the apparitions were beyond doubt and had been seen by many of his trustworthy children. The Egyptian government's own investigation found no trickery. No words were ever spoken; the church, on the road the Holy Family is said to have taken into Egypt, was itself built on a promise that Our Lady would visit it.
The recognition is that of the Coptic Orthodox Church, not of the Holy See; the site records Zeitoun on those terms, because of the scale of its witness and the concurrence of the Catholic patriarch of Egypt.