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Cairo

Historic Cairo

0 galleries · 7 museums · 0 places

About this district

Exhibo editorial

The medieval city — Fatimid, Ayyubid and Mamluk Cairo, its mosques, madrasas and gates still standing along streets that have carried traffic for a thousand years. At Bab al-Khalq, the Museum of Islamic Art holds over 100,000 objects spanning the seventh to the nineteenth century. Dense, loud, and layered in a way nothing else in the city is.

Galleries

No published galleries in this district yet.

Museums

Bayt Al-Suhaymi — museum cover

Bayt Al-Suhaymi

Beshtak Palace — museum cover

Beshtak Palace

Gayer-Anderson Museum — museum cover

Gayer-Anderson Museum

Museum of Islamic Art, Cairo — museum cover

Museum of Islamic Art, Cairo

National Military Museum — museum cover

National Military Museum

Public institution
Prince Taz Palace — museum cover

Prince Taz Palace

Public institution
Royal Carriages Museum — museum cover

Royal Carriages Museum

Places

No published places in this district yet.

Stories

All articles
An enamelled medieval Syrian glass bottle in a display case at Cairo's Museum of Islamic Art, restored after the 2014 bombing, the mend faintly visible in the glass.
Editorial

Cairo · Egypt

The Bottle That Was in Pieces on the Floor

A car bomb left one of the world's great collections of Islamic art in fragments on the floor. What the Museum of Islamic Art chose to do with the repair — mark it, rather than hide it — turns out to be the most quietly radical decision in the building.

Near the entrance of Cairo's Museum of Islamic Art stands an eight-hundred-year-old Syrian glass bottle with a small gold mark on its label. The mark does not mean the bottle is precious, though it is. It means it was broken — shattered on the floor by the 2014 bombing across the street, then patiently glued back into a single shape.

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.

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.

Sunlit central courtyard of a traditional Moroccan riad in the Fez medina, with zellij tilework, arched galleries and a fountain beneath an open square of sky.
Editorial

Marrakech · Morocco

Why North African Cities Turn Inward: The Story of the Courtyard

A courtyard plan far older than Islam turned North African houses — and the medinas built from them — to face inward. Climate and religion only half-explain why, and what finally displaced the courtyard says the rest.

The blank walls and inward courtyards of Fez, Tunis, Algiers and Cairo are usually explained by heat or religion. Both are true; neither is the whole story. The clue is in what eventually pushed the courtyard out of the modern city.

The colossal statue of Ramses II standing in the sunlit atrium of the Grand Egyptian Museum, reflected in the shallow pool at its base, with daylight falling through the roof.
Editorial

Cairo · Egypt

The Museum That Reflects Everything, Including You

How the world's largest single-civilisation museum gathers a nation's heritage, national story, tourism economy and repatriation claims under one reflective roof — and what those mirrored surfaces quietly ask of everyone who walks in.

Around the colossus of Ramses II, shallow pools mirror the floor so exactly that visitors keep stepping in. It is a small, faintly comic thing — and a way into a much larger question about the Grand Egyptian Museum. A civilisation is gathered here and made whole, while its three most famous faces stay abroad. A home for a nation's heritage opens, and the nation queues outside it. A monument to Egyptian sovereignty rises, financed largely from Tokyo.