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Cairo

Downtown Cairo

8 galleries · 7 museums · 1 place

About this district

Exhibo editorial

The nineteenth-century commercial core laid out on Parisian lines — wide boulevards, Belle Époque façades, and behind their doors some of the most important independent art spaces in the country. Townhouse, Mashrabia and their neighbours operate here in old flats and workshop buildings among the mechanics, printers and coffee houses. Rough at street level, serious inside.

Galleries

Museums

AUC Tahrir Cultural Center — museum cover

AUC Tahrir Cultural Center

Abdeen Palace Museum — museum cover

Abdeen Palace Museum

Beit El-Umma — museum cover

Beit El-Umma

Egyptian Geological Museum — museum cover

Egyptian Geological Museum

Egyptian Museum — museum cover

Egyptian Museum

Museum of Egyptian Railways — museum cover

Museum of Egyptian Railways

Postal Museum — museum cover

Postal Museum

Places

All places in Cairo
Armenian Cathedral of St Gregory the Illuminator — place

Armenian Cathedral of St Gregory the Illuminator

Cairo's Armenian Apostolic cathedral of 1928, with its conical dome and a memorial khachkar to the 1915 genocide.

Cairo

Stories

All articles
The empty glass case on the upper floor of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo where Tutankhamun's golden mask stood for decades, before its 2025 transfer to the Grand Egyptian Museum.
Editorial

Cairo · Egypt

The House Whose Famous Guests All Moved Out

When Tutankhamun's mask left Cairo's Egyptian Museum for the Grand Egyptian Museum, it took the crowds with it — but not the collection. What remains in the old building on Tahrir Square turns out to be a stranger and more interesting museum than the one that emptied.

For most of a century, the golden mask of Tutankhamun stood behind glass on the upper floor of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. In October 2025 it was driven out to Giza, and it was not the only thing to go: the royal mummies, the whole Tutankhamun collection, tens of thousands of objects have left the old museum for Egypt's gleaming new institutions.

An illustrated miniature in the style of the medieval Baghdad school: robed figures gathered under arches, painted in flat jewel colours with gold outlining.
Editorial

Baghdad · Iraq

One Thousand and One Nights as a Visual Network

The book that taught Europe to picture the East arrived with no pictures at all. Three centuries of illustrators — Dutch, Egyptian, Persian, French, German, Iraqi — each gave it a face, and every face was a self-portrait.

Open Galland's Thousand and One Nights, the edition that conquered Europe, and there is nothing to look at: no genie, no lamp, not one illustration. The most visually imagined book in the world began blind — and because its text was never fixed either, no picture of it could ever be a copy.

The dim, black-walled Royal Mummies Hall of the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization in Fustat, Old Cairo
Editorial

Cairo · Egypt

The Museum of Everything That Became a Tomb

Egypt built a museum to tell the story of an entire civilisation — seven thousand years of it, from flint tools to the present. The public knows it for one thing: the room where twenty dead kings lie in the dark.

In a black, hushed hall beneath the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization in Old Cairo lie the mummified bodies of Ramesses II, Hatshepsut, and eighteen other rulers of the New Kingdom — carried here in 2021 in a televised parade watched around the world.

The white marble dome and framing minarets of the Taj Mahal in Agra, mirrored in the still water of its reflecting pool at dawn.
Editorial

Baghdad · Iraq

Where Is Agrabah? The City Disney Assembled From Real Places

Agrabah was going to be Baghdad. A war made it fictional — and then Disney built it back out of real places, from a tomb in Agra to a valley in Jordan that usually plays Mars.

The Sultan's palace where Princess Jasmine feels trapped has the silhouette of the Taj Mahal — which is not a palace at all, but a tomb. That is how Agrabah works. Disney's fairy-tale city was going to be Baghdad, until the Gulf War made the name impossible; the studio invented a place that could not be found on a map, then quietly rebuilt it out of real ones — Isfahan and Agra, Marrakesh and Mandalay, a Jordanian desert that has played both Arabia and Mars.