Al-Ahram Weekly 22 - 28 June 2000 Issue No. 487
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

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Forbidden pleasure domes

By Fayza Hassan

A SECLUDED RESIDENCE: Shubra Palace was built in 1808, at the beginning of Mohamed Ali's reign. The wali needed to get away from the Citadel, his official residence and, according to Major Mahmoud El-Gawhari, chose this area as a retreat in which to erect his haramlik (private quarters) because of its incomparable beauty, lush greenery and uniquely secluded position on the shores of the Nile. Once the palace was completed, "a wide avenue, flanked by fast-growing sycamore and flowering trees, was laid out to connect the palace with the northern tip of Azbakiya," writes Janet Abu-Lughod, who does not believe that this avenue was originally constructed only to allow access to the palace at a time when the old city was gasping for want of major thoroughfares. In later years, this avenue, no longer private, became a favourite promenade of the Egyptian aristocracy.

WORKERS ON THE NILE: Turkish and Armenian architects were employed to build the original palace (which no longer exists), and many gardeners were employed to create a garden of exotic trees and shrubbery. Writing in 1954 and pandering to the political ideology of the time, El-Gawhari comments rather spitefully: "It has recently been revealed that the workers who participated in the building of this palace were ill-treated and tortured. Many of them died and those who rebelled were buried alive in pits by officials who had received orders from the 'Pasha' himself." Historian Ehud Toledano, on the other hand, notes that "[b]ecause some [of the construction projects] were in uninhabited areas, water and building materials had to hauled by camel and carts, often causing the workers great hardship. These were either soldiers, convicts or fellahin serving the corvée." He does not seem to have come across any barbaric burials, however, and attributes the harsh treatment of the construction workers only to Abbas, a loner who apparently suffered from palace-mania, ordering one erected in the most isolated corner of the country.

A SMALL VERSAILLES: Be that it as it may, Mohamed Ali must not have been entirely satisfied with the result of his building effort and, in 1820, hired French architect Pascal Coste to enlarge his residence in Shubra. He wanted a "small Versailles," complete with "groves, a labyrinth, a hippodrome, and a great expanse of water surrounded by galleries flanked by four pavilions; also a mosque and large alleys delineated with rows of trees." In his memoirs, Coste claimed that a project was submitted to, and approved by, the Pasha, but the Turkish and Armenian architects schemed to take it over, duly disfiguring it to suit their own interests. In the end, only the artificial lake, the galleries and the pavilions were constructed -- and not entirely to Coste's specifications, either. While the Frenchman showed no restraint in making clear his bitterness at Mohamed Ali's lack of support for the original plans, many historians have commented on the habit, begun by the wali and followed by his successors, of entrusting the same project to several architects, who often received conflicting commissions and worked at cross purposes. The result was "a mixture of meanness and extravagance, magnificence and dirtiness," wrote a visitor in 1847, as reported by Toledano.

In general, the new trend was to pay more attention to the façades, while the furniture (mostly European) was usually second-rate: "Marble floors, and shabby stuccoed walls; rich couches and curtains and some pieces of furniture that might have been picked up in Broker's Alley, London," wrote the visitor, who was nevertheless impressed by the beauty of the Shubra Palace, especially its gardens: "Turn which way I would, the scene was enrapturing," he commented; although, remarks Toledano, "here too he found the interior unworthy of particular notice."

THE EYES OF THE BEHOLDER: Born in San Remo in 1924, the late Prince Hassan Hassan, a great-grandson of Khedive Ismail, spent many happy years at the Shubra Palace. In the early 1920s, having returned from Italy where his father, Prince Aziz Hassan, had been exiled for political reasons, the young prince and his family moved into two "perfectly simple modern villas" which his father built on his share of the Shubra Palace grounds; the second of the houses, the salamlik, was soon to become one of the rallying points of the Wafd Party. There were several other small buildings scattered across the grounds, which were collectively known as Shubra village; but the most interesting features of the place were the gardens and the kiosque, which are at present part of Ain Shams Faculty of Agriculture. In his book In the House of Muhammad Ali, A Family Album (1805-1952), published posthumously, the prince described with a profusion of details the nymphaeum and its verdant surroundings.

"The Shubra Palace consisted originally of a large park reaching down to the Nile, carefully planted in extremely diverse sections: some were formal gardens, others were fruit groves of mangoes, guavas and citrus trees... In my childhood, the place had been abandoned for many years and some of the land sold and set back to agricultural use. The park was running wild, all the different elements intermingling in a romantic and informal manner. I remember the eucalyptus trees swaying in the wind, the mango trees with their thick, handsome foliage motionless at noon -- big sacred beetles moving clumsily in their shade -- and the elegance and scent of pine trees silhouetted against a striped evening sky.

"The main building, the haramlik, was demolished long before my birth... This building had been Aunt Aziza's share of my grandparents' property. She had had it demolished when it was rumoured that the British were thinking of taking it over. She felt it would be wrong to have the British use Muhammad Ali's palace for military purposes and the occupation of the country. It had been an early-nineteenth-century European idea of Arab style, built in white marble, with loggia and balcony adorned with metal and stucco arabesques. As the palace was reputed to have been of great splendour in decoration and furnishing, fortunes are said to have been made in town from the materials salvaged when it was demolished, including paintings that were framed in the walls."

Clockwise from top: the nymphaeum of Shubra Palace at the turn of the century; overview of the nymphaeum by Coste; original plan of the gardens by Coste; decorative motif on the ceiling with portrait of Mohamed Ali set in a medallion

The only part that survived the destruction was the kiosque, built more or less according to Coste's design, "a pleasance, its main feature being a vast square pool with a marble island at its centre... Surrounding the pool is a cloister-like colonnade broken up by four advancing terraces, all in white marble, exquisitely sculptured in a neo-classical , almost Pompeian style, the work of the French architect B [sic] Coste," wrote the prince.

"The building and colonnades are enclosed on the garden side by a wall composed mainly of amber-coloured windows and four doorways opposite the advancing terraces. In the four corners of the colonnade, on semi-circular platforms, stand marble lions spouting water into the pool. The ceilings of the cloister are painted with decorative motifs, among which there is a portrait of Muhammad Ali set in a medallion, and, in the opposite ceiling across the water, a corresponding one of his son Ibrahim.

"The rooms of the building are grouped in its four corners. On the right, when entering the colonnade, is a drawing room with an exceptionally beautiful parquet floor inlaid with intricate designs made of rosewood. It is surmounted by a heavily sculptured ceiling painted dark blue and gold with a handsome chandelier hanging from its centre. The room is furnished with nineteenth-century armchairs and chairs in the style of Louis XV lined up against the wall... Two other suites in the corners of the building were used as bedrooms, all walls and ceilings gaily painted with oriental arabesques. In the fourth corner is the billiard room. The wall on the right when coming in is decorated in the Italian manner of the period, depicting a romantic landscape with classical ruins, almost a trompe-l'oeil, but the flowing architectural lines that frame it are very Turkish. The three remaining walls are almost all windows, with on the whole length of the facing wall a deep divan. Originally this had been the dining room, but when King Louis-Philippe of France (1830-1848) sent Muhammad Ali the billiard set, with its superbly sculptured bronze-handled cues, he housed it there."

Hassan Hassan's childhood memories included playing around the nymphaeum (the fountain complex); in later years, his aunts would give lavish receptions there, attended by royalty passing through, or charity balls that included tableaux vivants featuring the daughters of Egyptian aristocracy. "The building would come to life for a brief moment, only to relapse again into its deathlike silence," wrote Hassan Hassan. In 1952, however, the curtain was to fall once and for all on the brilliant illuminations playing so gracefully on the waters, and the hubbub of titled visitors was never heard again.

Sources: Pascal Coste, Toutes Les Egyptes, Editions Parenthèses, 1998

Major Mahmoud El-Gawhari, Ex-Royal Palaces in Egypt from Mohamed Ali to Farouk, Dar Al-Maaref, 1954

Hassan Hassan, In the House of Muhammad Ali, A Family Album, 1805-1952, The American University press in Cairo, 2000

Nihal Tamraz, Nineteenth-Century Cairene Houses and Palaces, The American University in Cairo Press, 1998

Ehud Toledano, State and Society in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Egypt, Cambridge University Press, 1990

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