How green was this valley

Garden City, a city without gardens photo:Randa Shaath

Kafur Al-Ikhshidi, who ruled Egypt between 935 and 969, built a garden and a hippodrome overlooking the Khalig, which were later enclosed within Al-Qahira when the Fatimids established their capital to the northeast of Al-Fustat in 969. Cairo's Jewish population, congregating in a quarter close to the Fatimid palaces, were soon building their houses on part of the Kafur's gardens. The gardens disappeared to make room for the new dwellers, who remained there for centuries. To this day, the quarter is referred to as Haret Al-Yahud, although most of its inhabitants were gone by 1956.

Al-Qahira, the location of the Fatimid court and military complex, was a small rectangle surrounded by walls. The Khalig formed the city's boundary to the west. Several gates were opened in the western wall, which was separated from the canal by a street aptly known as Bayn Al-Surayn (Between the Two Walls). During the summer months, the Khalig and a number of connected ponds were flooded by the Nile and the urban population took to the waterways, spending nights on end in pleasure boats, entertained by dancers and musicians. Colourful boats, adorned with lights and little flags and carrying merry-makers, bobbed on the canal and the adjoining ponds, while the more rugged took a dip in waters illuminated by the lights decorating the houses on the shores.

Peddlers sold food and drinks on boats plying the watercourse, and important occasions were marked by memorable displays of fireworks. The cutting of the Khalig and the Prophet's birthday were two such moments, the description of which is a leitmotif in a large number of travelers' accounts. When the floods subsided, the landscape changed as the waters made way for a luxuriant vegetation; rides and promenades in the gardens at sunset replaced the joys of sailing.

Map of Cairo and Old Cairo in the 15th century (Andreé Raymond)

The Fatimid Caliphs built several belvederes (manazir) along the Khalig: these small raised rest houses afforded them a pleasant view over the waters and the verdant fields. One of the belvederes, Al-Lu'lu'a (the Pearl), was built on the eastern bank of the Khalig, near Bab Al-Qantara, and overlooked the Kafur gardens inside the rectangle of the Fatimid city while another one, Al-Ghazala, built nearby, was used to accommodate foreign visitors. Until the 13th century, Al-Qahira's main port, Al-Maqs, was situated to the north of what is now Al-Azbakiya. Bab Al-Bahr and Bab Al-Sha'riya were then gates opening directly onto the river. Between Al-Maqs and the quarter which later became known as Bab Al-Luq, the Fatimids established a belvedere surrounded by a large garden known as Bustan Al-Dikka. At the beginning of the flood season, as soon as the waters rose high enough to fill the waterways, the Caliphs would celebrate the opening of the Khalig at this particular spot with the required pomp.

This tradition remained in force until 1899, when the Khalig was finally filled permanently, and the Cairo electric tramway line began to run through what is now Port Said Street, one of Cairo's busiest arteries. West of Al-Dikka was a pond called Birkat Qarmout, situated approximately where Emadeddin and Naguib Al-Rihani streets intersect today. Two smaller canals, Khalig Al-Dhakar and Khalig Al-Khawr, dug for the purpose of irrigating the gardens of Al-Maqs, crossed Birkat Qarmout, adding to the lakeside character of the area. Khalig Al-Dhakar and Khalig Al-Khawr also supplied another pond, dug on the western side of the Khalig to enhance the view from Al-Lu'lu'a; over the years, this pond, Batn Al-Baqara (The Cow's Stomach), was neglected then periodically redug. The quarter of Azbakiya was later established on its site. In 1325, Sultan Al-Nasir Mohamed Ibn Qalawun ordered the digging of Al-Khalig Al-Nasiri, which replaced, as well as extended the course of Khalig Al-Dhakar and Khalig Al-Khawr. The new canal began north of the mouth of the main Khalig (Al-Masri), followed a parallel course, then joined it north of Bab Al-Sha'riya, to flow past Birkat Al-Ratli (today the quarter of Faggalla).

It is said that the new canal was only created in order to facilitate the transport of grain to the Delta on the main waterway, i.e. to relieve the heavy and constant traffic of pleasure crafts on the main canal, which used to obstruct the progress of boats carrying goods to the northern provinces. Unable to sacrifice the recreation of the population to more serious endeavours, the sultan solved the problem by offering them a new waterway. Life on the river banks has been described by several historians as rather unorthodox and was often condemned by the more puritanical among them. The Mameluke chronicler Al-Maqrizi mentions unveiled women, wandering musicians, wine drinking and generally illicit behaviour. Although for these reasons, throughout history, several attempts by religious authorities were made to prevent people from building private dwellings and mosques near the river, the advice was rarely heeded and Al-Nasir himself encouraged his amirs to build their palaces on the banks of his new canal. Within a short time, both its shores were covered with elegant villas, orchards, mosques, markets and other urban amenities extending from Al-Maqs to the shores of the Nile in Bulaq.

Development was also evident south of Al-Luq in the vicinity of Birkat Qarun, motivated in part by the excavation of Birkat Al-Nasiri which added to the beauty of the surroundings. Bulaq, emerging as an island from the Nile during the first decades of the 14th century, was swiftly subjected to the development policies of the Sultan Al-Nasir. It became an upper-class suburb, featuring winter palaces set amidst large agricultural estates. When the land began to stabilise, more permanent residences were built, serviced by a budding commercial district. At the time when Al-Maqrizi wrote his Khitat, although the eastern arm of the Nile had dried up completely, Bulaq was not yet used as a regular port. It is only after the fire which gutted the whole area in 1458 that the quarter was rebuilt in a way more suitable to the new functions it would fulfil until the second half of the 19th century. Starting in 1483, many travelers to Cairo mentioned their arrival at the port of Bulaq. Florence Nightingale noted in her travel journal on 26 November 1849: "off the boat at Bulaq (with our luggage on camel) we had driven up the great valley of acacias from Boulak to Cairo to Ezbekeeyeh." It is mainly during the 14th century that princely residences began to be moved from the confines of the crowded city to the shores of the canals and around the numerous ponds which, depending on water infiltration, tended to appear and disappear periodically, leaving behind a trail of colourful vegetation. Furthermore, members of the aristocracy often adorned the gardens of their palaces with private ponds to which water was drawn by waterwheels. By this time, the Nile's movement westward had began to slow down, uncovering large stretches of land which remained above water for part of the year.

Sailing boats passing through the new (Qasr Al-Nil) bridge over the Nile

THE ISLAND OF ZAMALEK made frequent appearances around that time, but remained undeveloped until the end of the 19th century. Due to the gain in terra (almost) firma, the main Khalig, which had formed the western boundary of the Fatimid city at the time of its founding, now ran right through its middle. Cairo, which had never been more beautiful, attained in those years almost the same dimensions and the aspect it was to preserve until the soldiers and savants of the French Expedition laid eyes on it.

In 1735, De Maillet, the French consul in Cairo, wrote about Birkat Al-Fil, one of the most famous location for princely palaces until the 19th century: "Nothing is more pleasant than this place filled with water during eight months of the year, while during the remaining months, it turns into a perfumed garden." Less than a century later, Edward Lane pictured Birkat Al-Ratli in Cairo Fifty Years Ago, imparting a similar vision: "[M]any lotus plants are seen in blossom in the month of September. The lake at that season is quite full; soon after it dries up, and the ground is sown with corn." Not every Westerner was taken with the profusion of water and vegetation, however, and many writers were prompt to associate the Orient with the smell of decaying marshy plants, huge refuse dumps, cholera, flies, mosquitoes and malaria. A case in point is Jean de Thévenot, who had visited Egypt in 1660 and had certainly not been taken by the beauty of the riverine landscape: stopping briefly in Cairo, he found the city "huddled at the foot of the Muqattam which deprived it of the benefits of easterly winds, too far from the Nile, the expanse between the mountain and the river sprinkled with stinking birques [birkas]".

In the course of the city's history, new ponds were dug to enhance a palace view, others simply were left to dry out, while more permanent ones changed their names several times. Al-Maqrizi has recorded the names of the most important ones known in the 14th century: Birkat Qarun (near the quarter of Ibn Tulun); Birkat Al-Siba' (between Fustat and Al-Qahira); Birkat Al-Habash (the popular quarter of Bassatin, south of Maadi, occupies lan once submerged by this small lake); Birkat Al-Nasiri (dug by Al-Nasir Mohamed, south of Bab Al-Luq); Birkat Al-Shuqaf at Bab Al-Luq; Birkat Al-Ganaq north of Bab Al-Futuh; Birkat Al-Ratli (north of Bab Al-Sha'riya, where the residential area of Faggala was established in the 19th century); Birkat Qarmut in Al-Maqs; and Birkat Al-Fil. (This birka was filled definitively around 1845 and, in 1850, Khedive Abbas built the palace of Darb Al-Gamamiz, which he surrounded with several feddans of majestic gardens. The redevelopment of the area began in 1890 with the elimination of the gardens, which were divided into large plots, followed shortly after by the destruction of the palace to make room for the modern quarter of Hilmiya).

While Al-Maqrizi's chronicles, written during the first half of the 14th century, trace the history of several birkas which endowed the capital with its special character, Al-Jabarti's accounts, dating from the beginning of the French Expedition, centre around Birkat Al-Azbakiya, on the shores of which beautiful palaces surrounded by magnificent gardens had been built during the 16th and 17th centuries for the pleasure and comfort of the rich and the famous. For several centuries the area around the lake was described as the heart of the increasingly cosmopolitan city, reverberating with the momentous events it witnessed, such as the establishment of Bonaparte's private quarters in Mohamed Bey Al-Alfi's new palace, the assassination of Kleber and the lavish celebrations organised for the wedding of Mohamed Ali's daughter Zeinab, an unprecedented extravaganza at the time.

"When Bonaparte was in residence, the Ezbekieh in front of the palace was still connected to the Nile by a channel so that when the river flooded, the square became a lake. But Muhammad Ali had the channel blocked and the swamp drained, and new gardens were laid out. The palace in front of them was given to his daughter, Princess (sic) Zeinab, but she in turn handed it to a religious institution. However when [Samuel] Shepheard explained his plan for a new hotel, [Khedive] Abbas agreed to let him have use of the palace," writes Anthony Sattin. As the most elegant residential quarter of Cairo, Al-Azbakiya epitomised the plans and ambitions of the rulers of the time and was therefore the object of constant attention. Rarely does an account of a visit to Cairo omit a detailed description of the famous lake and its environs, the greenery surrounding it, the amusement park, the restaurants and theatres and the military bands which provided a greatly appreciated weekly spectacle to all those who could afford the entrance fees to the gardens.

In one of his famous letters, written at the turn of the century, Bimbashi McPherson recounts: "Sabri had tickets for the Ezbekieh Gardens where a unique kind of Gala was proceeding. We stayed there until midnight listening to Native and European singing, watching Turkish sword-dancing and sham fighting and innumerable shows. The fireworks were particularly fine and the whole gardens most lavishly lit up and furnished with tents, etc. Fruits and Ruhbat Laqaom [Turkish delight] were passed around gratis and boats in the lake were free."

The transformation of Cairo into a modern capital is usually dated to the Mohamed Ali era and the development of Shubra and Bulaq, the former as a palatial residence, the latter as the favourite site for his attempts at industrialisation. His son Ibrahim, more interested in agriculture, concentrated his efforts on leveling and planting the area which was soon to become Ismailiya and Nasriya, and which extended roughly from Qasr Al-Aini to Bulaq. For a time, the area where Garden City and downtown now stand held three palaces surrounded by splendid gardens and orchards. Abbas, on the other hand, turned his back on the city and the river, choosing instead to reside in the desert where he created the new suburb of Abbasiya. He is nevertheless credited with the first extensive transformation of the Azbakiya into more formal gardens. When Said Pasha came to power, he inherited a capital precariously poised between East and West, but in no hurry to follow either path.

The elegant carriageway of Shubra Sreet, 1860 Alfi Bey Palace in Azbakiya : the first Shepheard's Hotel

KHEDIVE ISMAIL, however, had no time to wait. Pressed by his own ambitions and the circumstances which had placed him at the forefront of a momentous international event, the opening of the Suez Canal, he rushed the city headlong toward Western-style modernisation, for which it was ill-prepared: he willed pink and gold palaces to sprout incongruously on agricultural land, decorated these ephemeral edifices with wrought-iron "mashrabiya", ready-cast in France, then furnished them with elaborate brocades and delicate pieces of imported marquetry; he demanded that roads be laid overnight, and a make-shift bridge had to be hurriedly thrown across the Nile to link his Qasr Al-Nil Palace with the new one, built on the Gezira especially to accommodate the Empress Eugénie, his guest of honour for the event.

Ismail ordered ponds drained and others dug and transformed into charming little French puddles, featuring families of foreign ducks ill at ease in their new habitat; he insisted that fully grown trees be forced into the ground around squares, while hedges everywhere were given the obligatory Parisian trim. The principal architects of this magic transformation, Pierre Grant, Barrillet Deschamps, Cordier and Ali Mubarak, were often craftily played off one against the other in an attempt to push them into accomplishing the khedive's impossible dream: to metamorphose Cairo into the Paris of the Orient in record time. Often short on finances, and under tremendous pressure, they only managed to give Cairo a hasty makeover but, like a faded beauty after botched-up plastic surgery, in the end, the city only managed to lose its original character without really requiring a new lease of life.

Furthermore, Ismail's efforts fell far short of his attempts at Western grandeur: "This tremendous flurry of municipal planning and city building culminated in the fall of 1869 with the festivities which attended the opening of the Suez Canal on the 17th of November," writes Janet Abu-Lughod. "In reading Western accounts of the fetes, one senses that guests and hosts operated somewhat at cross purposes. Ismail did his best to create a European image of himself and his country; the Europeans wanted only the exotic. [Theophile] Gaultier glanced distractedly past the Parc Monceau [the new and improved Azbakiya Gardens] bordering his veranda at Shepheard's Hotel, seeking the world of the Arabian Nights. The guests at Ismail's grand reception at the Qasr Al-Nil Palace were treated to a chamber concert and a performance of the Comedie Française; they had looked forward to an evening with Scheherazade."

There were pleasurable moments, however: "On the other side of the Nile" one significant improvement was ready in time for the canal celebrations," writes Sattin. "Ismail [had] ordered a solid road to be built from the west side of the Nile out to the Pyramids (which lies under the present Pyramids Road) and along which [the Empress] Eugénie is said to have planted acacia trees, part of a line of them which provided shade across the valley. She is also said to have made good use of the road during her visit to Egypt, riding out to the Pyramids each day that she was in Cairo." According to Sattin's perhaps somewhat fanciful account, Eugénie returned to Cairo in 1909. BothNapoleon III and the khedive had died. At the age of 83, she was driven along the Pyramids Road. "There were tears in her eyes as she passed along the avenue of trees which she had planted and which had now grown tall. At the foot of the Pyramids, the old royal lodge which had been put at the disposal of the Empress and her party in 1869 had been turned into the Mena House," Sattin adds.

By the time Ismail was deposed in 1879, the city centre had been, willy-nilly, almost entirely developed according to his desires. "Only one large pocket of potential settlement within the circuit of the existing city remained completely unexploited until the 1880s," writes Abu-Lughod. This was a sort of triangular area bound on the south by Bulaq Street (26 July), on the east by Nubar Pasha Street, and on the northwest by the Ismailiya Canal. Before the Nile shifted its course, this area had been under water. It had been transformed over the years into marshland and was now an integral part of the city, an eyesore lying between the elegant European quarters of Azbakiya and Ismailiya. In the mid-1880s, Khedive Tawfiq ordered the draining and the leveling of the area, which was subsequently subdivided into plots, sold to members of the Egyptian aristocracy and transformed into the fashionable quarter of Tawfiqiya. This was the last of the numerous large-scale projects undertaken in the nineteenth century and aimed at modernising the Egyptian capital.

On the threshold of the 20th century, with a population of 600,000, "the city had completed its physical and ecological mitosis into two distinct communities," writes Abu-Lughod. "The old native city had been left relatively intact from the pre-modern age, its abandoned areas reconstructed (to house rural migrants who had been drawn to the capital). A new European-style city had developed parallel to it on the west, and had began to encircle it on the north." This dual process destroyed for ever the pleasure gardens of the old city as well as the modern khedivial attempts to create more modest pockets of groomed greenery.

With the advent of the 20th century and the sudden growth of the capital into one of the largest cities in the world, the few remaining gardens today are little more than pathetically bedraggled and incongruous reminders of an anachronistic age.

Pyramids Road before 1869

Sources:
Janet Abu-Lughod, 1001 Years of the City Victorious (Princeton, 1971); Jean-Luc Arnaud, Le Caire, mise en place d'une ville (Actes Sud, 1998); Doris Behrens-Abouseif, Azbakiyya and its Environs from Azbak to Ismail, 1476-1879 (IFAO, 1985); Barry Carman and John McPherson, eds., Bimbashi McPherson, A Life in Egypt (BBC, 1983); Colin Osman, Egypt Caught in Time (Garnet, 1997); Andre Raymond, Le Caire (Fayard, 1993); Anthony Sattin, Lifting the Veil: British Society in Egypt, 1768-1956 (Dent, n.d.).