# Khedive period architecture in Cairo, Egypt



## trismegistus (Sep 14, 2020)

Usually my posts tend to stick to late 19th/early 20th century American architecture, but it was hard to resist after doing some digging.  Hope you dusted off your Stolen History Bingo board because we're about to dive into some extremely familiar territory!

My rabbit-hole started with this video from Zahi Hawass - -Gatekeeper Extraordinaire.  Here he is trying to shill for his government in the midst of an uprising because he had just recently gotten a promotion.  I will give him some modicum of credit that even though the Muslim Brotherhood did take control of the country shortly after this video, eventually the military in conjunction with the Egyptian people successfully performed a counter-coup to remove them.

​However, that is literally all the credit you will ever hear me give that awful man who is heavily responsible for why Egyptian history is so wrong.  However what piqued my interest is at the end of of the video when asked about the antiquities in the Cairo Museum in light of the uprisings.  He claims that he is on his was to "restore" over 70 objects that were destroyed during the clash. 

That led me to this article about the event - - apparently not only were 70 items broken but 18 also "went missing".  However, while the missing and broken artifacts are interesting and could likely be its own SH post, that is not the focus of my research.  No, what opened this whole thing up for me was a section of the article towards the end:



> On Sunday, the museum director and an architect walked around the roof of the 110-year-old building to draw up designs for upgrading security on the glass-paneled sections of the ceiling.
> 
> "*We can't interfere with the original architecture of the building because it's a monument,*" el-Awady said. "But we are thinking about how to upgrade this and put in a new security system for the ceiling of the museum."


The building itself is a monument?  I have to say, having been there many years ago, it is a truly remarkable building.  It is _massive_, and impressive on its own even taking the "antiquities" out of the picture.  So what is the deal with this place?

*The Cairo Museum*











​A brief intro:



> The Egyptian museum is located at the Tahrir square; it was built in the reign of the khedive Abas Helmi II. It was opened in November 1902.
> The current museum is *the third museum* was built to restore and exhibit ancient monuments in Egypt.


​


> In year 1858, August Mariette, the Director of the Archeological Department, prepared the first museum in Boulak . Unfortunately
> , the Nile flooding in 1878 caused many monuments were washed away and others were stolen. Mariette work hard for establishing a suitable museum for housing the Egyptian monuments.
> In year 1891, the contents of Boulak museum were transferred to annex in the Giza palace of Ismail Basha, considered the second museum.
> Then, the *French architect Marcel Dourgnon*, won the competition organized to choose the best design of anew large museum, made the design of the Egyptian museum in a neo-classical style. The work started in 1897 and ended 1901 and was opened in 15 November 1902.


On the engraving above the main entrance of the building:



> There are 2 letters "A" and "H" symbolized the name of the khedive "Abbas Helmi II" because the museum was established in his reign, also there are two years 1897 and 1901, represent the date of starting and finishing works of the construction.


While not incredibly important to this post, the Khedive period of Egypt from 1805-1914 is a fairly interesting one, as it rose from the ashes of Napolean's withdrawl from Egypt and sought to establish a "new" Ottoman empire.  There are a lot of threads to tug on that are tangentially related to this post, but I don't want to derail my own thread before I even finish it so that may also need to be reserved to its own discussion.

I can't find any photographic evidence of the first two museums, it seems that photography wasn't nearly as present in Egypt like it was in Europe and the USA.  Its not easy to find period photos of this particular museum either, especially because Cairo is in the process of building a brand new museum to replace this one which takes priority in the search algorithims when trying to search for "Cairo Museum construction". 

So, who was this architect?

*Marcel Dourgnon

*​Don't bother looking him up on Wikipedia, he doesn't have an entry.  Actually that is not entirely true, you will only find his entry in French wiki.  That said, his bio is barebones there.  I will admit there is a decent amount of links about him in French but admittedly my french isn't great - - I can make out around 50% but nothing confident enough to where I would use it here in the post.  If there are any french speakers who can dig deeper into any documentation to the legitimacy of this man, it would be greatly appreciated.  Here is what I was able to find, and those that have been following my series of posts about architects and their architecture you will note that even though it is on a completely different continent, it all rhymes.



> Marcel Dourgnon Lazarus was born in Marseille on 29 September 1858 in modest circumstances; *his father is a mason*. After very successful in the School of Fine Arts in his hometown - he notably won the prize for painting and architecture - he was sent as a boarder at the *Beaux-Arts in Paris*.


​Yes folks, we found another one.  A card carrying freemason who attended the Beaux-Arts in Paris.  I did manage to find his "Club Card" so to speak, which is a first for me. 




​

Notice anything curious about this document?  There is another name crossed out here - - Michel, and replaced with Marcel.  Harmless misspelling or possibly injecting this man into the historical record?  There are a few more documents associated with his records in Beaux Arts, one of which I am guessing is a birth certificate (if it is then why is the document dated 20 years after his birth)?  There is a ZIP file attached to this post with the rest of the photos, since I am having difficulty getting the birth certificate looking image uploaded on here.  I suppose its possible for this to be part of an application to the school, but my french isn't good enough to dicipher the rest of the document, and the handwriting is difficult.  That said it does appear to include some of his accomplishments as an architect.  As I said above, if someone else is more gifted in the language can shine some light on this it would be appreciated. 

Now, in regards to the design of the Cairo Museum itself, I was able to find some interesting (google translated) nuggets.



> His project, which features a two-story building with a reinforced concrete structure, Western neoclassical style harmoniously combining archways, domes, columns, pilasters, is retained.
> But the result is less positive: " _Very quickly, we realized the difficulties of the architect's plan, deemed unenforceable by manufacturers Dourgnon asked to be relieved of work supervision and Consul General held to ensure that. his name appears on the facade, so that the work should retain 'its french character. the name was actually recorded, but on the right side panel. as for the total cost, it was 220 000 £ E, a exceeded more than 47% of the initial budget!_ "





> Dourgnon* will not complete the work and do not attend the inauguration in 1902* ...
> It should however be noted that " _neither his imagination nor his jurisdiction were involved, since at the same time he was* building on behalf of the Egyptian government the palace of the country at the World Exhibition in Paris*, the main façade reproduces that of an ancient temple in Nubia, the other facades were entirely decorated with scenes and characters from the Pharaonic history_ . "
> Its realization collects downstream of the public: " _The exterior of the palace of Egypt was beautiful Its architect, Mr. Dourgnon, was reconstituted on the left of the portico Dandour Temple_"


It is possible that there are some translation issues here (research on this time period in foreign countries is quite difficult, not just because of lack of information overall but also very little of it is in english), but the gist of it seems to be that someone took over midway through the project and he was never present for the inauguration which seems a bit strange, albeit convenient historically.  Moreover, he unsurprisingly designed a building for the Paris World's Fair during that time.


Egypt Palace, Paris World's Fair - Marcel Dourgnon​
For anyone who wants to do some more digging in french, I also found this book in which he is mentioned written in 2006.

Suffice it to say, for a period of time in Egypt Beaux Arts design was the Architecture Du Jour, so to speak.  Though it seems in Egypt this period is referred to as the Khedive times.  This is certainly not the only example of Beaux Arts design in the city of Cairo.



















​If I didn't tell you where these buildings are from, would anyone have guessed it would have been Cairo of all places?  This stuff looks like it came straight out of Renaissance Rome or Baltimore/St. Louis/Washington DC circa 1900s.  What is unique about Cairo is that a lot of this architecture still seems to be standing for the most part (there is likely a lot more but photos of the city are fairly scarce and Cairo is far too huge to go scrounging around Google street view).  This is because as far as I can tell, it is one of the only cities that did not experience any catastrophic fires.

I know that _@Apollyon_ created this Battlefield Egypt thread to imply that there is some evidence of some major event that happened in Egypt - - however his evidence seems to be focused on Egyptian ruins which tend to exist outside the major Cairo metro, and may have happened at a completely different time period.  Either way, a lot of these buildings seemed to be spared from the destruction of history and our overall points do not seem to contradict one another.  However as a footnote to _@Apollyon_'s post, there does seem to be precedence for a large "fire" in Cairo in 1321. 

*Speculations and Questions for discussion*​It is clear there is something strange about the Museum itself. Why is it that they can't build out a security system? Is there something to the design of the building that would keep them from doing so? Perhaps some evidence of an alternative energy source are hidden inside the walls?  Bonus points for anyone who can find anything that could be considered construction photos.  You'd think for a building that is not only a monument but holds what Egyptians take the utmost pride in that there would be more information about this place.

Is this Marcel Dourgnon just another spooky possibly fake architect from the L'Ecole Beaux Arts?  It seems like this architectural style is not only ubiquitous in the West during this time but also in North Africa.  While I understand that there were many French and English living in Cairo at the time, it still strikes me that they were able to source the skilled labor for these designs in those days.  According to this not very reliable source - - the population of Cairo at the time is thought to be around 1 million people.  This is somewhat corroboroated by additional sources.  Keep in mind, here is an example of what Tahrir Square looked like 10-20 years before the museum was built.

​Here is a wide shot of the "old" section of the city taken 10 years before the above photo.

​Other than the magnificent mosques which were likely not built by the population inhabiting Cairo in the 1870s, I don't see a ton of evidence that there were a bunch of highly skilled craftsman waiting in the wings to build all of the previous discussed opulence in a few decades.  "Well certainly it was all those French and English folk who came to Cairo to build this stuff" you'll say to me.  According to the census data, around 5% of the population were European - - so how many out of 50,000 people came to Egypt just to build all this stuff if that were true?

*A Stolen History Footnote*​This isn't explicitly related to architecture or the architects in my post, but I couldn't resist posting a few things I found in the comments section while researching some of this architecture.  Specifically, I was looking at the history of this beautiful building - - the Villa Yousef Cattaui Pasha.

​The author tends to come off a bit too smarmy for my taste - - but his goal in the article was to set the record straight on some subtle aspects to Egypt's history that was likely "stolen" from the major population.

However I came across these comments from Egyptian people (this is some _old_ internet - - the comments date from 2000) that I thought we would get a kick out of, as it seems back 20 years ago the Egyptian people ran into the same frustrations we do here when it comes to trying to unpack what really happened "back then."



> Subject: Kamal El Dine Salah
> Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 09:47:15 -0500
> From: N.S in New York
> Re: "Our Lady of Kasr al-Nil." I still remember the beautiful villa of Kout el Kouloub and the beautiful Tiffany-like stained window it had. Regrettably, our government did not keep any documents or information about anything. Sadly, we know very little about the Mohamed Ali Dynasty, albeit the (****) Nasser's dark era wanted us to know. No historian, no books, no nothing. *We know the history of our great ancestors yet know nothing about our history 150 years ago.*





> Date: Sun, 05 Mar 2000 16:51:46 -0500
> From: Mai Saleh
> 
> You are talking about ignorance and poor educational standards. Well, I know of kids who go to English schools in Cairo and actually don't know how to speak the language at all. Totally mind-boggling and a real shame. We're producing a severely mal-informed, mal-educated and a frighteningly narrow minded (to put it mildly) generation whose mere sense of knowledge revolves around "Hammam Fi Amsterdam" and the like!!





> From Caroline Tucker
> Mounira
> 
> Samir Raafat decries the public's ignorance of local history, yet how does he expect it to know these facts if they're not taught in schools nor passed on orally from one generation to the next nor easily obtainable in general-interest books? No one contests that there's a general historical amnesia (and by no means just in Egypt), but instead of reveling in this to showcase his own knowledge, why doesn't Mr. Raafat concentrate on sharing that knowledge instead of whining about how we don't know anything.


Let's keep fighting the good fight, we aren't the first and we certainly won't be the last!  


> Note: This OP was recovered from the Sh.org archive.





> Note: Archived Sh.org replies to this OP: Khedive period architecture in Cairo, Egypt


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## trismegistus (Nov 21, 2020)

Some nice film reels that compliments this post nicely.  Museum shows up towards the end of the first video.


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