Architects try to save Cairo’s historic heart
GOVERNMENT VOWS TO PRESERVE CITY AS EGYPT’S CULTURAL CAPITAL
Alaa Al Habashi was looking for ingredients for a Ramadan feast when he stumbled upon an Ottoman-era mansion being used as a slaughterhouse and butcher’s shop in Cairo’s historic Islamic district.
“I was blindsided by the beauty,” the United Statestrained architect said of the house that he had first seen more than two decades ago.
Built of brick and stone, it has a large inner courtyard and a number of rooms with decorative painted wooden ceilings.
He struck up a friendship with the butcher, who owned the building, and received a call from him several years later saying a property developer wanted to buy it and tear it down.
Determined to save the building, Al Habashi bought it in 2009, only to be told he could raze it but not restore it. He refused to give up and won the right to restore it after a two-year legal battle. A decade after he bought the building, the restoration is almost complete.
His battle was part of a larger fight to save old buildings which some professional restorers and architects fear is being lost because of bureaucracy, official corruption and laws that they
say do little to protect Egypt’s architectural heritage. “I’m not at all optimistic. I believe only 25 per cent of the buildings will survive,” said May Al Ibrashy, a restorer who has been working in historic Cairo for about 25 years.
Government officials did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this article.
The five-square-kilometre historic quarter, which has one of the world’s biggest collections of Islamic architecture, has been declared a World Heritage site by the United Nations’ cultural agency Unesco.
Legally responsible
But though its main monuments are not under threat, many houses and smaller buildings are being demolished. Government inspectors, fearing they could be held legally responsible for any problem, have declared many centuries-old buildings in danger of collapse since earthquakes in 1992 and 2005. Many have been replaced by cementand-brick high-rises that critics say are garish.
The demolitions appear at odds with government officials’ pledges to maintain Cairo’s role as Egypt’s “cultural, tourism and heritage capital”, despite work on building a new capital east of Cairo to ease pressure on the city of more than 20 million. Those ■ ■ fighting to save old buildings in historic Cairo say the demolitions are destroying a potential stream of tourists and revenue from tourism, which earned Egypt $11.6 billion (Dh42.66 billion) last year, according to the central bank.
Al Habashi’s bureaucratic nightmare began when he applied Egypt’s total annual earning from tourism in 2018 old buildings replaced with high-rises in Al Darb Al Ahmar
for a permit to begin restoring the house soon after he bought it. He said the government replied that the house was condemned as on the verge
‘Urban fabric’
Only after obtaining a letter from a Unesco official confirming the building’s historic importance was Al Habashi able in 2011 to secure a court ruling that he could restore it.
Destruction of historic buildings since 2011 has been extensive, said a foreign restorer who studied historic Cairo’s Darb Al Ahmar district. “My analysis is that approximately 15 per cent of the urban fabric in Al Darb Al Ahmar has been replaced by newly-built structures seven to 10 storeys high,” he said.
Nearly 100 historic buildings in Al Darb Al Ahmar were replaced with high-rise buildings as central authority collapsed after the 2011 uprising that ended autocratic president Hosni Mubarak’s 30 years in power, said architect Tarek Al Murri, who has years of experience working in the district.
For art historian Shahira Mehrez, and six others with whom she bought two dilapidated houses, it is convoluted rent control laws that have stymied restoration work. Yet other laws have frustrated Cherif Abdul Meguid, a hotel developer who, since 2007, has bought eight historic houses in the hillside Darb Al Labbana neighbourhood.