Cairo, Day 1: The Citadel, Muhammad Ali Mosque, and Egyptian Museum

Our guide/tour director, Amr – I can already tell he’ll be excellent, even though the tour only began this morning – introduced himself with the following quote from Ibn Battuta:  “traveling leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.”  Take my word for it: hard as it may be to believe, I was indeed speechless during our visit to the Egyptian Museum this afternoon.  Now, though, it’s time to tell stories.

The day began with a visit to the Cairo Citadel, a massive, fortified complex built in the 12^th century at the direction of Salah Ad-Din (Saladin) in response to the Crusades.  The Citadel was the seat of Egypt’s government for nearly 700 years.

Today, it has two main attractions:  a military museum, which we didn’t tour, and a 19^th century mosque built by Muhammad Ali, who was a heavyweight in his own right long before Cassius Clay changed his name. 

The mosque is enormous, with an elegant courtyard, a clock tower gifted by France in exchange for an obelisk from Luxor that now stands in the Place de la Concorde – the clock has never worked; perhaps Egypt should have given the obelisk to Switzerland instead – and a vast, alabaster-clad prayer hall. 

After lunch at a restaurant that would have offered sweeping views of Cairo on a less hazy day, we made our way in fits and starts to the Egyptian Museum.  Traffic in Cairo was abysmal, but our bus’s glacial pace gave me a chance to take some more or less clear photos through the bus window. 

Amr said traffic is particularly bad this week because of the much-delayed opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM) – not to be confused with the (I suppose) Spinet Egyptian Museum, which we visited today.   

The GEM’s opening attracted heads of state and other dignitaries from around the world, resulting in lots of road closures and exacerbating the usual congestion.

We’ll tour the GEM tomorrow – I kept thinking Amr was saying “we’re going to the gym tomorrow,” which would be an odd itinerary choice for the Smithsonian – but this afternoon we spent a couple of hours in the original Egyptian Museum.

Built in 1902, the Egyptian Museum houses a phenomenal collection of artifacts – statues, coffins, funerary goods, stela (not the Marlon Brando kind), papyri, ceremonial bowls – dating back to Egypt’s unification nearly 5000 years ago. 

The quality and condition of the collection are breathtaking, there are clear English explanations alongside each exhibit, and many of the displays are out in the open, rather than behind glass.

As impressive as today’s museum is, the GEM is supposed to be world-class amazing.  Tomorrow should be a memorable day – we’re visiting the pyramids of Giza before heading to the GEM.  I’ll describe all that in my next post.  See you soon!