Take an architectural tour of Cairo with Salem Charabi

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My father is Egyptian and my mother is Danish; both doctors, they met in the 1990s in Copenhagen where I grew up. My story isn’t one of displacement; it’s one of choice. Every school holiday, we would visit family in Egypt (my father has six siblings). I have so many memories of driving around Downtown Cairo with my fighter-pilot cousin, or watching my grandmother, Oufa, ironing in the hallway of her home. As I’ve got older, I’ve become more conscious that travelling to north Africa from Copenhagen – the most orderly and sanitised city – has made my world much bigger, and more open. 

I moved to Cairo full-time this summer. There’s an unfathomable vastness to the city that’s not just physical but present in its layers of history and stories. Founded in the Fatimid dynasty in 969 CE, Cairo – then known as Al-Qāhirah (meaning “the Victorious”) – has seen Ayyubid, Mamluk and Ottoman eras. Like a palimpsest, its story is being constantly rewritten. But if you lean into the chaos, it can be the most generous place. It’s pointless to try to work against it or control things. My advice is have a loose plan to get from A to B – then leave everything else to chance. 

Egyptian architect Malak Abdelhady made me want to relocate here. I trained as an architect and have been building my furniture practice with limited materials and resources just outside Copenhagen since 2017. Here, there is an abundance of craftspeople, domestic techniques and materials that I could never have even imagined. It is already completely transforming my work. 

If you lean into the chaos, it can be the most generous place

Nowhere expresses Cairo’s compression of history more intensely than the City of the Dead, a vast necropolis that dates to the 7th century. A living cemetery, graves, mosques, homes and artisan studios all exist side by side. You can see glassblowers and blacksmiths, as well as silk-rope makers who use the length of the street to weave their wares. To the east of the Mamluk cemetery is one of the period’s most significant funerary monuments – the 15th-century complex of Sultan al-Nasir Faraj ibn Barquq. It includes a mosque and a school, and has an incredible courtyard and one of the most beautiful rooftop views.

Cairo is a city of cars – you’ll inevitably need to take a cab here – but everything is best experienced on foot. One of the few places you can move around without being boxed in by traffic is the district of Al-Darb al-Ahmar (meaning “the red path” in Arabic) in Historic Cairo. You can take an official guided tour through the narrow streets. Home to more than 1,000 artisans – from tent makers to furniture makers – it’s typically Cairene in that it’s a place where plans can get easily derailed. You’ll see an artisan carving figurines from bronze and end up spending the next three hours with them. The more I explore, the more I discover that Egyptian craftspeople work on a value system of knowledge sharing.

Al-Darb al-Ahmar is also where you’ll find the home of the 20th-century architect Hassan Fathy, now called the Egyptian Architecture House. It mixes Ottoman and Mamluk influences and is filled with his intricate models of Islamic architecture. Fathy transcended architecture to talk about craft, culture, engineering and politics. He even wrote plays. He created the village of New Gourna in Luxor using mud brick (in ancient times only funerary buildings – temples of immortality – were built in stone, not homes). It’s worth visiting the American University in Cairo’s Rare Books and Special Collections Library to see his technical drawings. 

Egyptian craftspeople work on a value system of knowledge sharing

One of Fathy’s best friends and frequent collaborators was fellow architect Ramses Wissa Wassef. I’m lucky to be living in a house on the compound of the Wissa Wassef Art Center in Harrania. Established in the early 1950s, it’s a community of craftspeople, whose studios he built from adobe. I’m in the process of setting up a small atelier here; my first project is a series of stone chairs carved by sculptors in Luxor. 

The Wassef workshops and exhibition spaces are open to visitors, and are also close to the wonderful Adam Henein Museum. It has a verdant palm-dotted garden filled with the modernist sculptor’s figures and animalistic forms, including a monumental Noah’s Ark. For me, it’s Cairo’s answer to The Noguchi Museum.

Further afield, you can drive around 80 miles south-west of Cairo to the Fayoum Oasis, where a community of potters, weavers and basket makers live among the dunes and lakes. Pigeon is a culinary delicacy here, so there are farms all over Egypt. The towers they roost in, which you’ll see across the city, are one of my favourite expressions of Egyptian architecture. Whether lashed to the tops of urban buildings or formed from ceramic pots, they speak to the power of architecture and the lengths to which people go to support living. 

My favourite place on the planet is the Mosque of Ahmad ibn Tūlūn, one of the oldest complete examples in Africa. Built from red brick in 87AD, it is a masterpiece in the study of space. Its tulip-shaped minaret is so monumental and yet so pared-down. When I first visited a decade ago, what struck me was how out of time this ancient structure felt. If you climb to the rooftop and catch the call to prayer, it’s exceptional. In pictures it looks isolated, but in fact it has all kinds of architecture pressing up against it – and that’s the beauty of Cairo.