Once a very picturesque neighbourhood, the Cairo suburb of Heliopolis has for long been associated for residents of other parts of the city with the Cairo International Airport.

But, designed as “an oasis of quality life” in the early 20th century, Heliopolis was built 10 centuries after the city’s then Fatimid rulers built Cairo in the 10th century CE as an extension and replacement for the three previous Arab capitals of the country.

It long had the status of the newest neighbourhood of the capital, as it was only in the second half of the last century that Cairo started to see newer neighbourhoods with the construction of Madinet Nasr (Nasr City) east of Heliopolis. Then, during the last decade of the century, there came Tagammu further east and 6 October city to the west. The latter were mostly designed for gated communities rather than according to more typical neighbourhood designs.

For its residents, however, Heliopolis is not associated with the airport but rather with the tram system that they used to commute in and out of the neighbourhood until it was removed a couple of years ago. There was also the palace of its founder the Belgian industrialist Edouard Empain, who built the neighbourhood in 1905 away from the hustle and bustle of the city centre and his burial place at the Basilica de Notre Dame.

The residents lamented the removal of the tram, questioned the aesthetics of the renovation of the palace, and most recently contested plans to build a flyover at the sides of the Basilica. They have never given much attention to any renovations or extensions done to the airport.

“I remember that when I used to get off at Ramses Station in Cairo, coming from my work in Benha in the Delta, and then get a taxi and ask the driver to head to Heliopolis, some drivers would still ask if I was heading to the airport or whether I lived there. That was in the early 1960s,” said Sawsan, a retired school teacher who has been living in Heliopolis for most of her 83 years.

“At the time, we still called it the Ramses Station because just as we stepped out of the gates there was a magnificent statue of Ramses II with a beautiful fountain next to it. This is no more.”

In 2006, the Ramses II statue was moved to the new Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM) on the Pyramids Plateau. It had previously come from Upper Egypt in 1955 to stand outside Cairo Station, also known as Mahitet Masr (Egypt’s Station) given that Cairo is often called Masr. It was then that city residents started to refer to the square as Midan Ramses rather than Bab Al-Hadid — the “gate to the railway”.

People have always taken pride that the station is one of the oldest in Africa. “Its interiors were very beautiful. They did some renovations about 10 years ago, and it has looked different since then — not the same,” Sawsan said.

It was in 1892 that the station was built, its interiors designed in Neo-Mameluke style. For over a century, this style was kept more or less intact, and the station was renovated several times in line with the original design. However, in 2011 renovations erased the classic interiors and introduced a new and shiny style inspired by Pharaonic themes. For Sawsan, it was “disappointing”.

This is a word she often refers when talking about changes that have been taking place in Heliopolis too, including removing the tram that residents for decades referred to as the metro and was a favourite transport for the middle classes. Work has also been done to double the width of streets to make roads similar to highways and build flyovers that can now make it impossible for residents of apartments to enjoy tea on their balconies.

“Things have changed. Things look very different — and I would say not as beautiful anymore,” Sawsan lamented.

In her younger years, Sawsan had to commute from Alexandria where her family had taken up temporary residence after the shifting of her father’s business away from Heliopolis where they had started in the early 1920s. But she kept coming to Cairo for visits that would take her to Heliopolis, her birthplace, to meet up with her friends.

Her place of choice was always Groppi’s, once a fashionable tearoom, either in Heliopolis or in one of two downtown branches.



CAIRO VISITS: Giacomo Groppi, the founder of Groppi’s, came to Egypt from Switzerland in 1884 in his early 20s and established a successful food and confectionery business. In the early decades of the 20th century, he launched three Groppi’s tearooms in Cairo.

“Groppi’s was the top tearoom in town in the 1930s and 1940s. When I went to work there in the 1940s, it was responsible for the catering of top parties and dinners,” said Jacob Girgis, who worked for Groppi’s in his younger years.

“People loved the ice cream and for a reason: the dairy products and fruit used to come from a special farm near Alexandria,” he recalled.

For young Sawsan and her friends, ice cream at Groppi’s in the late 1940s was followed by a film at one of the many cinemas in downtown Cairo. “We loved the Metro Cinema, in particular,” she said.

Alternatively, there could be a visit to the Opera House built by the khedive Ismail in the late 19th century and burnt down in 1971 to be replaced by an ugly multi-storey car park known today as the Garage Al-Opera. The square that hosted the Opera is still known as Midan Al-Opera despite the construction of the new Opera House built with a Japanese grant in the late 1980s on the island of Zamalek.

At a later stage of her life, Sawsan would take the train to commute between Benha, a small city in the Delta where she got her first job, and Cairo, where she got married and lived in Heliopolis after her family went back to the district in the early 1950s after the Free Officers Revolution in 1952.

“When we came back, Heliopolis had expanded further, with the city coming much closer to the airport. We did not go back to the same house we used to rent in the older quarter of the district, but chose a newer apartment building that was constructed in the late 1940s. It was not in the traditional style of architecture of the original houses of Heliopolis, but it was a beautiful building,” she recalled.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Heliopolis was moving beyond the original style of architecture inspired by the Mameluke style, as architects started to embrace art deco and art nouveau, especially for the villas that were popular at the time. This continued to be the theme until the early 1960s when a gradual shift was made towards the modern style.

“Then it was just nothing — just apartment buildings with very little aesthetic quality. And they kept getting less and less interesting and taller and taller until the late 1980s when we started to see beautiful old apartment buildings and villas being knocked down to allow for the construction of very ugly buildings,” Sawsan said.

 “This was happening all over the city — not just in Heliopolis. Cairo was not just losing its architectural heritage, but it was losing its beauty bit by bit as well,” she added.

Indeed, residents of once-beautiful neighbourhoods like Zamalek and Garden City also have pain to share not just over the huge architectural losses that their neighbourhoods have suffered since the 1970s, but also about the dilapidation of the quality of life in them. They have been overstretched to accommodate the residential and business interests of the new money made since the Open-Door Policy of the mid-1970s.

In the opinion of Sawsan and other residents of Heliopolis, however, their district was not among the first to be “hit” by the decline of architectural aesthetics and green spaces, essentially because it was out of the way. Heliopolis was also close to the house of Egypt’s former president Gamal Abdel-Nasser at Mansheyet Al-Bakri. Nasser passed away in September 1970, and he is buried in a mosque in the district.

From an administrative point of view, Mansheyet Al-Bakry is part of Heliopolis. However, it is more of a connecting point between the district of Abbasiya, whose name is a derivative of the name of Abbas Helmi II, the last khedive of Egypt and Sudan who ruled from 1892 to 1914.

During the 1970s, late president Anwar Al-Sadat lived in Giza. However, in 1975, when former president Hosni Mubarak was made vice-president, Heliopolis regained state attention.

When Mubarak, living with his spouse in Heliopolis since the late 1950s, became president in the early 1980s, Heliopolis became the venue of his executive offices and the headquarters of the presidential palace in the original Heliopolis Palace Hotel built in 1910. This has remained the presidential palace of Egypt’s later presidents.

By 2020, architects were building a new presidential quarter in the New Administrative Capital east of Cairo. According to an executive source, this means that the Heliopolis Palace Hotel might eventually regain its original function. “It could be a hotel to host top visiting officials,” he said.

It is not just Heliopolis that is getting ready to end its time as the place of the president, however. Cairo as a whole is getting ready to be Egypt’s previous capital with the upcoming inauguration of the New Administrative Capital, whose anticipated opening in 2021 might see the end of the rule of Egypt from Cairo, the seat of power for 13 centuries since the Arab conquest of the country in the seventh century CE.



CITY LAYERS: The evolution of Cairo and its expansion in all directions but mostly towards the east often came with an association with one or other modernisation schemes.

From the construction of the Babylon Fortress in the first century CE before this part of Egypt got the name of Cairo (Al-Qahera) to the most recent construction of a series of flyovers across eastern Cairo, expansion was always the wish of one ruler or another. Residents moved along with the expansions.

Sawsan’s three children got married in houses in neighbouring Nasr City. The first of her grandchildren has just got married in a house in one of the compounds that were built over the last 15 years further east in Tagammu.

Throughout the centuries, most of the expansions of Cairo were designed with an eye on modernity, marking a shift in the style of architecture and the patterns of construction to the changing norms of life. Houses that were made to fit a lifestyle based on gender segregation and the combination of teaching religion and education at home were redesigned for another that dropped social segregation and saw the separation of teaching religion from wider education.

Today, it only takes about 20 minutes to drive from Al-Azhar Street, which carries the name of Egypt’s most famous mosque built by the Fatimids, to Adli Street in downtown Cairo to see the shift in architecture from the largely Mameluke to the largely art deco.

Adli Street, which carries the name of an early 20th-century politician, is part of Al-Qahera Al-Khediweya (Khedival Cairo), one of the most celebrated parts of the city. It is this zone that is now referred to as Wast Al-Balad, the city centre, or downtown Cairo.

Downtown Cairo has some of the most prominent modern architectural gems that used to house some of the city’s most influential residents from the late 19th century until the early decades of the 20th century when they started to move to Garden City and the newer neighbourhoods further west while the middle classes were moving further east.

Some of the beautiful palaces of this area have now been knocked down and their gardens built over, a process that started as early as the first decades of the 20th century to make room for the apartment buildings that still house a few of the city’s nicer cafés and restaurants on their ground floors.

Like Heliopolis in the east of the city and Maadi in the south, late 19th and early 20th century downtown Cairo was a place of mixed communities, with Egyptians, both Christian and Muslim, people of Levantine origin, Jews, and Europeans all living together.

It is in the same apartment building in downtown Cairo that Albert Jacques Arié, perhaps the city’s last Jew, has been living since his parents moved to the building from another downtown apartment building in the 1930s. The plaque on the door of the apartment still carries the name of Jacques Arié.

Like other upper middle-class Egyptian Jews in downtown Cairo, Garden City, Maadi, and Heliopolis at the time, Arié, now 90 years old, attended the Lycée Français next to the AUC Tahrir Building, spoke French at home, and frequented tea rooms in the centre of the city.

While still in his teens and a student at the Fouad I (now Cairo) University School of Arts, Arié and another member of the same communist movement, Roger, also Jewish, made their first visit to Haret Al-Yahoud, or the Jewish Alley off Midan Al-Opera, as volunteers on a campaign of awareness against the spread of cholera in 1947.

In line with the norms of these times, the social circle of Arié was never knitted around his faith, but rather around interests and above all around a left-wing political orientation.

This was not unusual for Jewish Cairenes of the time. An older friend of Arié’s, Chehata Haroun, also a resident of downtown Cairo, stood up for his Egyptian affiliation during the wars with Israel, according to his daughter Magda Haroun, now the head of the Cairo Jewish community.

She is hard at work to help renovate and restore as many of the buildings that are associated with Cairo’s Jewish heritage as possible so that when she is gone the monuments will still stand to tell a chapter of the story of Cairo.

Some of these Jewish buildings, like the Jewish Cemetery in Al-Bassatin south of Cairo, are in a miserable shape and require considerable maintenance. Other buildings are intact, carrying the history of the Jewish presence in the capital of Egypt. They include the main synagogue on Adli Street and a few others, including one in Heliopolis, that have been closed for decades.

Meanwhile, some buildings have been demolished or have fallen into total decay. Some have gone through a functional metamorphosis, such as the building of the Alliance de la communauté Israélite du Caire, the former community centre, that has been turned into a vocational-training centre.

A few are in the downtown zone, but many are also in the eastern part of the city in Abbasiya and the adjacent Sakakini district, whose name is associated with the palace of Habib Gabriel Antouan, a man of Syrian origin associated with his father’s business of making knives (sakakin), that was built over 120 years ago.

This is the neighbourhood where prominent Egyptian singer Laila Mourad was born, a Jew before she converted to Islam.



SAKAKINI: Sawsan recalls that her late husband Aziz lived in a small apartment in Sakakini before their marriage after having come to the capital from a Delta town in Gharbiya.

“When we got engaged in the 1960s, it was still a pretty neighbourhood that matched his stories of a middle-class district that like Heliopolis had a mixed community of Jews, Christians, Syrians and Armenians,” she said.

At the age of 85, Fawziya is one of the oldest owners of apartment buildings in Sakakini. On the ground floor of her buildings there were once two apartments rented by a Jewish family and a Coptic family. The first left in the 1950s, and the second in the early 1970s. In the mid-1980s, Fawziya rented out the first floor to Ahmed, who turned the entire floor into a restaurant serving grilled lunches.

Ten years ago, Ahmed left to pursue his business in 6 October, while Salam, a Muslim Chinese, stepped in to take over the restaurant and turn it into one of several inexpensive Chinese restaurant for a sizable Chinese community. This is made up either of students who have come to Egypt to learn Arabic or to study Islam at Al-Azhar University or of Chinese people looking for jobs in Cairo.

By late 2020, Salam, his name of choice since he came to Egypt, had left as his business had dwindled. Fawziya rented the place out to Marwan, a Syrian, who is now serving popular Syrian fast food.

“This neighbourhood has seen so many people coming and going, but only the Jews left buildings that are indicative of their identity. One cannot miss the synagogue or the school that still carries Hebrew writing and Jewish drawings on its external walls,” Fawziya said.

It was, however, the Armenian community that persisted most in Sakakini, downtown Cairo, and Heliopolis. Now in his early 90s, Apkar-Vahram Proudian is perhaps the oldest of the Egyptian-Armenians in Cairo, though he is now too frail to attend the weekly mass at the Armenian Patriarchate in Ramses Square near his apartment.

“This was once called Abbas Street. Then it was named after Queen Nazli, and then it was called Nahdet Masr. For the last few decades, it has been Ramses Street. I don’t think the name will change again,” he said.

 Proudian has stories to tell about this neighbourhood that has lost its residential nature to turn into a place for office buildings. He recalls the construction of the first segment of the 6 October flyover that has now grown to connect eastern Cairo and Heliopolis and Nasr City to western Cairo and Zamalek and Giza, including Dokki and Mohandessin. He also recalls the construction of the first line of the Cairo metro that now has three lines connecting eastern and southern Cairo, eastern and western Cairo, and northern Cairo and Giza.

Like Arié, Proudian was born in Cairo in 1920. However, he was not born in downtown Cairo but in Gammaliya not far from Al-Azhar Street and the Jewish Alley. And like Arié, who looked over the city from his balcony to see the former British barracks being turned into the headquarters of the Arab League and old buildings falling into disrepair, from his window Proudian saw the exodus of the Jewish community and the many changes in the way people dressed and looked.

A few years ago, Arié was happy to see the restoration of the synagogue on Adli Street, and Proudian was also happy to see the restoration of the Orthodox Armenian Church on Ramses Street.

Architect-archaeologist Nairy Hampikian was the one behind the restoration of the church, as she has been behind the restoration of several Coptic and Islamic gems in Islamic Cairo. “We cannot just let the history of our city fall into oblivion. This is our city — it is all about our lives and who we are,” she said.

Hampikian was heartbroken to see the 2018 demolition of the old Kalousdian Armenian School not far from the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir Square that was built in 1854 and whose students have been sent off to Heliopolis to what is now the new Kalousdian-Nubarian Armenian School.

“It was not just an Armenian piece of architecture that was lost. This was the loss of a piece of Cairo architecture that was used as a school for boys and girls who were Egyptian-Armenians,” she said.

The demolition of the school was part of a wider process in the Maspero area behind the headquarters of Egypt’s Foreign Ministry to allow for the construction of a modern office zone.

As an architect and archaeologist, Hampikian is upset to see the city losing segments of its history “so unnecessarily,” and she reminds us that there are technical ways to save buildings and still allow for development. In 2020, Hampikian was “devastated” to see the demolition of a segment of the Cairo Cemeteries to allow for the construction of the Fardous Axis — flyovers designed to facilitate traffic from western and downtown Cairo to the east of the city and beyond.

Celebrating the diverse history of Cairo in the 19th and 20th centuries is the best way to inform newer generations about the layered story of the city, argues Andreas Mavromotis, a third-generation Egyptian-Cypriot and dean of the Cypriot community in Cairo, another small community like the Greeks and the Armenians.



CHANGING TIMES: With the dwindling numbers of these communities, some buildings associated with them have gained new functions.

For example, the Greek School in downtown Cairo was bought by the AUC for what was known as the Greek Campus before it moved to the First Settlement and rented the building to some businesses. But the churches that this Greek community once frequented are now almost empty even on Christmas Eve.

Most such churches were built in the 19th and 20th centuries with the arrival of waves of migrants from the Levant and Europe. “When I was a child, this church accommodated close to 1,000 people. It would be so crowded that it was difficult to find a seat, especially at Christmas and Easter. The congregation was mostly made up of Europeans who had come to Egypt in the 19th century or had been born in Egypt to families that had come either after the opening of the Suez Canal or earlier,” recalled Christine who frequents the St Joseph’s Church of the Franciscan Order of Egypt.

However, this functional evolution has not always had a happy ending. Some apartment buildings have lost their residential function to accommodate commercial services that have not been suitable for them.

Sawsan recalls that the last time she went to visit her cousin Thoraya in Manial, a district built on three adjacent Nile islands in southern Cairo, she was “shocked” that two apartments on the floor of her cousin’s building had been turned into storage lots for a textile factory.

Palaces of the former ruling Mohamed Ali family were built in Manial during the 19th and early 20th centuries, but today the district has lost its upper middle-class atmosphere.

Hossam, the grandson of Thoraya who got married in the apartment of the grandmother of his spouse in Manial 10 years ago, says that he has few recollections of a nicer Manial, though when he was a child most apartment buildings were similar to the one his family lived in, having an average of four floors and often surrounded by a garden.

Urban developers argue that changes in housing in Cairo have to do with many things, including changing perceptions of what makes a nice apartment building. By the 1990s, it was considered that older buildings in older neighbourhoods did not always qualify as nice places to live in. People coming back from the Arab Gulf countries wanted to buy new apartments in newer residential districts like Dokki and Mohandessin.

This meant that two or three-floor buildings, whether villas or apartment buildings in Cairo, including in areas like Zamalek and Garden City, became at risk of being knocked down to allow for high-rise buildings of possibly up to 15 floors to accommodate the increasing demand for city housing.

Meanwhile, during the past four decades these neighbourhoods have in some cases been surrounded by mushrooming zones of poorly developed urban housing or even shanty towns to accommodate rural-to-urban migration and those pursuing better opportunities in the city.

Older neighbourhoods have suffered from the impact of rural-to-urban migration and new money over the past four decades. Dalal, a resident of Mounira, is a civil servant approaching the age of retirement. She was born and brought up in the same neighbourhood where her parents started their married lives in the early 1950s. Her recollection of the neighbourhood of her younger years is one of clean streets and nice buildings, some dating back to the 1920s and some to the 1940s or 1950s, inhabited by often civil servants who could maintain a decent lifestyle.

 However, during the past 20 to 30 years, Dalal has seen what she qualifies as “a very upsetting change” to this neighbourhood, turning it from a middle-class district to a lower middle-class and lower-class one.

“I think that with the ‘devaluation’ of civil servants during the 1970s and early 1980s when a civil servant had no way to make ends meet on a monthly salary, the neighbourhoods that were inhabited by civil servants also suffered a similar ‘devaluation’,” she said. The sign of this came with the change in housing patterns whereby one can no longer rent an apartment but has to buy one.

Today, she argued, most of those who still live in rented apartments like hers in older neighbourhoods cannot afford to pay for the maintenance of what might have been very beautiful buildings. Given the little money that the rent brings in to the owners, the latter are also often waiting for the apartments to become available so that they can be offered for rent on a commercial basis.

Alternatively, if an owner can have all the apartments in a building free, he can often knock it down and build a new one with more floors to sell on.



LEAVING THE CITY: Nadia and Mohsen built a three-floor apartment building in Nasr City that they have been living in together with their two married sons and their respective families.

During the past year, the sons have been arguing that the time has come to “move on” and to sell the apartment building to a contractor who would knock it down and build a high-rising building instead. This would enable to family to move into three “nice houses in one of the new compounds” surrounding Cairo.

The argument they put to their parents is that Nasr City is losing its character as a residential area, with many apartments now turned into commercial services. For them, the last straw was that one of the several fly-overs that have recently been built is right in front of their balconies, meaning that their privacy is violated.

The children of Sawsan are also arguing the need to leave Nasr City and Heliopolis behind and to move out to Tagammu. They tell her that Cairo is becoming “too difficult to put up with” and that Heliopolis and Nasr City have been turned into “highways” to connect Cairo to the New Administrative Capital. She knows they are right, but she feels she is too old to leave the place she has almost always lived in.

“All of Cairo has not been properly maintained for 50 years or so. I think it all started after the military defeat of 1967 when things got complicated and all resources had to be invested in preparation for the war that would reverse the defeat,” Sawsan said. Sadly, she added, after the defeat was reversed in 1973, things did not pick up “in the right direction”, however.

For her, Cairo is doomed: the Open-Door Policy of the 1970s, immigration to the oil-rich Gulf countries in the 1980s, the austerity measures of the 1990s, the decline of the middle classes, and the ascent of the new rich have all contributed to the decline of the city.

“It is true that things are changing, and maybe they will change more, but I know that I have lived my life in a city that was once quite beautiful and that my neighbourhood resisted even as the rest of Cairo was becoming more and more crowded and noisy and polluted.

“I only wish I had more photographs of the city as it once was to leave to my grandchildren and their children, but we did not go about taking pictures at that time. However, I do have some pictures to leave in memory of the good old times,” she said.

*A version of this article appears in print in the 25 February, 2021 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly