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Al-Ahram Weekly 27 July - 2 August 2000 Issue No. 492 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 27 July - 2 August 2000 Issue No. 492
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters
The Helwan Secondary School, once the summer residence of Khedive Tawfiq; the Local Council headquarters, formerly a palazzo belonging to a now-forgotten pasha
Sugar plateau
Royal residence, desert city, polluted spa -- whatever one might say, H is most definitely for Helwan, cheers Samir Sobhi. Photographer Randa Shaath, in tow, captures some of the place's charms
Historically speaking, Helwan has been the worthy protagonist of a gripping drama of neglect and renewal. And with recent environmental and beautification projects increasingly keeping up with the city's growth rate, renewal is evidently imminent. So it is in a spirit of hope that one celebrates some facets of Helwan, a former seat of power and beauty queen that has fallen into neglect but could yet regain its formerly exceptional status. One is compelled to review the city's history and geography (perhaps more eclectically, more impressionistically than one should) in the hope, not only of better understanding Helwan's present ordinariness, but also of remembering its past extraordinariness.
Perhaps the most paradoxical enclosure of the vast residential-industrial belt surrounding Greater Cairo, Helwan -- 28km from the city centre -- was once considered "far out." Present-day excursions reveal otherwise, however, with even the longer of the two main routes -- along the Maadi Corniche -- taking little more than 30 minutes by car (assuming, of course, that you've chosen a time when traffic congestion is nearer its minimum). The highway running parallel to the Muqattam hills from the Citadel to Helwan -- 20 minutes' drive -- is a quicker, if far less scenic, alternative. But whichever route one chooses, immediately upon arrival, the suburb's unique physical character is manifest.
Located near the edge of the eastern plateau that extends parallel to the Nile, Helwan is less than five kilometres away from the water, 85m above sea level and 40m above common (Cairo) ground. While the metro line divides the area into eastern and western Helwan (the former up to eight metres higher than the latter), it is the remarkable dryness of the atmosphere, the sprawling, red-tinted limestone, and the celebrated warm springs (the temperature of their famously healing waters reaching 33°C) that make up one's impression of the natural landscape. Originally conceived as building blocks laid out in a grid 56 kilometres square, Helwan is similar in design to Washington DC. But despite many architectural mementos from better times, its man-made landscape and its offshoots have in the past decades presented mostly visions of industrial pollution and residential shabbiness.
Some 4,750 years ago, Helwan became known to the vast majority of people, even if the area it now occupies was not properly built up until the time of Abdel-Aziz Ibn Marwan, one of Egypt's early Arab governors, 70 years after the Prophet Mohamed's Hijra. On the former occasion, it was the architect of the Zoser Pyramid, Imhotep, who stumbled upon the plateau and noticed the qualities that made it habitable, not a mere extension of the desert south of Cairo. On the latter occasion, Helwan first acquired its present location and name. But in the meantime, the area of the plateau had been occupied by more than one Egyptian city, which had periodically fallen into disrepair. When Ibn Marwan fled to the desert following the plague in Fustat, the Arabs' earliest capital, he was taken to a spot called Abu Qarqoun. Impressed with the dry climate and warm springs, he decided to stay, building a magnificent city that was to be his seat of government for the next 15 years. And the name he gave that city (derived from helw, sweet, like sugar, hence pretty or appealing) is said to have been suggested by an Iraqi metropolis sharing many of Helwan's features: location on a plateau, proximity to a river, proliferation of sulfurous ground-water springs, and palm trees.
photo: Antoune Albert
photo: Mohamed El-Qi'i
photo: Abdel-Aziz El-Nemr
Health spa, health hazard: clockwise from top right, statues of Buddha in the Japanese Gardens; the Observatory; a 1938 issue of the Helwan school magazine; the school's main gate, which once led to the Khedival stables; the high school Scouts' troupe; the remainder of the Khedive's palace (photo: Randa Shaath); the Khedival Theatre, later transformed into a cinema, now abandoned; the new Ministry of Health building, in the style of Helwan's nineteenth-century architecture; the Kabritage spa, known for the healing powers of its sulfurous waters
Helwan thrived for seven centuries, then began to disintegrate -- very rapidly, Ibrahim Bey El-Farghali, who burned down what was left of its buildings and roads, being the notorious (Mameluke) agent of its downfall.
Helwan did not pop back into prominence until the reign of Khedive Abbas, who sent his sick soldiers there for treatment and in whose time physicians prescribed the springs of Helwan for sulfur-deficiency ailments. Helwan was established as a spa, to which foreigners and rich Egyptians flocked. Under Khedive Ismail, Abbas's heir, it became a centre for upper-class pleasure bouts, witness to the luxury of royal palaces and spring-water baths. Following Ismail's death the upper class took to living there, or at least establishing winter residences. It became a winter resort, its famous hotels and casinos not only making it a major stop on railway lines but placing it at the centre of Egypt's map of leisurely pursuits -- horse races, sophisticated gardens, grand soirées... From 1903 (the year the observatory was transported from Abbasiya to Helwan following the introduction of the electric tram, whose waves interfered with the observatory's transmissions) to 1952, Helwan was a fashionable residential area for the rich.
The Revolution brought to Helwan some of the large-scale developments experienced by the country as a whole, and whose long-term side effects Helwan would duly suffer: low-income housing (the 600 housing units built on the western side of the plateau, to be known as New Helwan), an iron and steel factory (the first of many polluting industries, including arms factories, to be established on the plateau, located only 10km south of Helwan proper), the south Cairo power station together with housing for its personnel -- these are only a few of Helwan's post-Revolutionary landmarks. Their establishment coincided with the building of a highway stretching all the way from Nasr City to Helwan. Among the more positive examples of the abrupt transformation Helwan experienced under the new regime were the restoration of the Japanese gardens, the opening of the monarch's villa to the public and the accelerated sprouting of schools, shops and parks. By the early 1960s Helwan had been handed over fully to "the people," the (not so) Secret Airport bus stop replacing sculptor Fouad Abdel-Malek's once celebrated Wax Museum (established in 1934) as the city's most frequently encountered milestone.
The regal architecture of Mohamed Ali's sons soon began to assume civil and public roles. Palaces were often converted into schools, the Helwan Secondary School, formerly Khedive Tawfiq's palace, being the most prominent. Workers' housing spread rapidly around the textile and light industries that now dotted the area side by side with Helwan's initial, heavy industries. Despite repeated efforts at improving the environment, however, the damage was spreading exponentially. To mention but one example: The then governor of Cairo Omar Abdel-Akher provided for the expansion of green areas and the establishment of a huge garden in his 1993 land-allocation plan for Helwan. In November 1995 Al-Akhbar announced that the environmental problem would end by 1997, yet in 1997 the amount of cement dust in the air -- produced by cement factories, some of which recycle the city's refuse by burning it -- was estimated to be 478 tons per square mile (as opposed to the average world figure of 15 tons per square mile). Helwan, a spa, had turned into one of the world's most polluted enclosures, much of its magic ground water flowing untapped, to waste, some of it almost as polluted as the air. It was thus that Helwan lost its lustre in post-Revolutionary Egypt.
By 1997, the man-made landscape had reached a corresponding impasse -- drabness, low-life domestic unrest and the kind of petty violence that is the focus of novels and films written by the young (Helwan) author Mustafa Zikri, becoming the city's latter-day trademarks. This is incredibly saddening, if only because Helwan is the Cairo suburb that housed public figures like the Wafd leader Mustafa El-Nahhas and prestigious families like the Yakans, in whose Helwan residence a teenage Umm Kulthoum sang before rising to fame. A former suburb, many years ago Helwan started developing its own satellites -- 15 May Housing Complex, Osman Housing Complex, the City of New Ain Helwan, etc. -- and what beautiful early 20th-century buildings survive are surrounded by aesthetically repulsive industrial plants and innumerable, nondescript apartment blocks. Naguib El-Manqabadi, the owner of a famous newspaper, Misr, who spent his childhood in Helwan, recalled three grand buildings now virtually invisible: the Al-Hayat Hotel, the Ministry of Endowments headquarters (later turned into the Fouad I Sanatorium for Pulmonary Diseases) and a Protestant chapel (abandoned in 1908, taken over by the Anglican Church and finally by the Coptic Orthodox Patriarchy).
Aesthetic quality of life notwithstanding -- it is not unimaginable that this problem should be addressed in the future -- it is the environment that presents the most pressing issue; and on the environmental front, at least, since 1997 there has been good news. Aside from the detailed studies, investigations and plans undertaken by the state's environmental and scientific apparatus as well as various departments of Helwan University -- most of which remain blueprints -- the tree-planting campaign launched by the dean of the Faculty of Pharmacology, Sobhi Said, has reached a new peak in recent years. Programmes designed to spread health awareness among Helwan's permanent inhabitants have been implemented, and the new policies on recycling, refuse and filtering have resulted in a marked improvement in Helwan's environment, so much so that by the end of May 1999, a 60 per cent drop in air pollution was registered, bringing pollution down to Cairo levels. In March the governor of Cairo, Abdel-Rehim Shehata, had set aside an LE58 million budget for the development of Helwan and the protection of its environment. The city also ranks high on Mrs Mubarak's list of priorities.
And thus one ends, as one began, on a note of hope -- may Helwan reclaim the qualities that gave it its name.
