Researching Turn of the Century Cairo

Writing Dead Egyptians necessitated several research trips to Egypt – taken in 2017, 2018, and 2020, respectively.  Historical accuracy was very important to me, even though in the context of historical fantasy, I could have been much freer and looser.  I see all historical fiction as a pillared hall.  The pillars are the facts – they are unmovable, unchangeable.  Once you understand these pillars, though, you should feel free to fill the chamber with whatever you want, so long as you are not compromising historical integrity.  It’s not to say you can’t find a historical inaccuracy in Dead Egyptians – Egyptology is a fickle mistress.  Tomorrow, they’ll find a cup, and then suddenly we know, ‘Oh, hey!  I guess he was the brother of the pharaoh, not the pharaoh’s son.  Oops!’

It’s a huge field and it requires constant attention.  For that reason, it was absolutely painless to research turn of the century Cairo, relative to researching Ancient Egypt.  Albion’s story kicks off in 1902, and there is so much information about Cairo in that time that you almost don’t have to call it research.  It was all there.

Much like my novel, my research journey began with the inimitable Shepheard’s Hotel.  Anyone who was anyone began their Egyptian adventure at Shepheard’s.  It was the beating heart of the Egyptian experience (from the perspective of a British visitor, anyway).  The actual hotel is long gone–it was burned to the ground, along with virtually every other British hotspot, in 1952, at a critical point in Egypt’s struggle for independence.  The tactic worked, if you’re curious – in many ways, it was the day the Egyptians took back their country once and for all.  You can visit Azbakeya Garden (spelled Ezbekiyyah in Dead Egyptians), where Shepheard’s once stood, and try to imagine it, and that’s as close as you can get these days.  The anecdotes survive, though.  I spent many months in an old book I found called Shepheard’s Hotel by Nina Nelson, and it was a remarkably thorough account of anecdotes chronicling all of the eras of the hotel’s glory, as if she had the ear of a bartender from every decade.  Between that book and the wealth of photographs available online, I was able to reconstruct Shepheard’s as it was in 1902 pretty confidently. 

Finding Albion’s house could not possibly have been done from a book, however.  I knew it was a ‘ramshackle collection of boxy rooms’ because that describes every rundown mansion in Cairo.  I knew the mashrabiyya woodwork was glorious, because that also describes every rundown mansion in Cairo.  But among many candidates, only the Gayer Anderson House could possibly have served as the real-life inspiration.  I visited others, Beit al Suheimi and the Palace of Amir Taz are incredible too – but they are a little too palatial to be single family homes.  They are also devoid of any furnishings and it’s trickier to imagine them as real residences.  The Gayer Anderson House, by contrast, is still furnished the way Major Gayer Anderson left it.  Every antique is still in its spot, and although it’s large enough to be labyrinthine, it is perfectly cozy.  None of which sealed the deal.  When I set foot onto that roof, I knew I had found the place.  In 1902, the roof of the Gayer Anderson house would have been the tallest spot around, and in combination with those glorious wooden screens, would have been a magical retreat from the chaos of the city.  The courtyard, too, has to be experienced.  If you know Cairo, and you know how chaotic the city is, to step onto that balcony overlooking the courtyard is a very tranquil experience.

 

You don’t have to be particularly imaginative to experience Albion’s Cairo, because most of the city pre-dates 1902.  And you feel it.  Let’s talk about Old Cairo, shall we?  Albion’s favorite hangout is a fictional coffee shop called Houda’s.  That part is truly fictional.  But it was important to me to have Albion wandering around Old Cairo at night – I couldn’t resist her charms if it had been my aims, to use his language.  On my first trip to Egypt in 2017, I was so excited to see Old Cairo that I went there before I went to the pyramids.  Truly.  I would have hopped in any guy’s cab to get there – and I did.  Literally jumped into the first cab I saw and said, “Take me to Shara Al Moezz.”

Shara Al Moezz is a pedestrian-only street and a UNESCO world heritage site – it hosts the greatest concentration of medieval Islamic architecture anywhere in the world. It’s also the Cairo of your imagination.  I immediately left the main drag and started taking left and right turns, and was elated when the alleys got narrower and narrower.  At one point, I was in an alley so narrow that it was about as wide as myself.  It was just me, a goat eating garbage, and an old man sitting on a stoop and smoking.  And I knew I had made it.  I had been studying Egyptology for twenty-seven years by that point, and folks in the states were quick to warn me that the real Egypt might disappoint me.  What would it all come to, if I finally got there, and my whole life was a lie?  They could not have been any more mistaken.  That old man and that goat will never know how happy they made me.  I had arrived.

We should talk about Edwardian Cairo too.  The Egyptian Museum was built in 1902, and had only been open for a matter of weeks when Albion arrived.  Plenty has been said about the Egyptian Museum – it is a very divisive place, as Albion himself points out.  In 1902, people were outraged by it, because museums at the time were, in general, palaces that were turned into museums.  They were very opulent places – silk wallpaper, lacquered wood floors, you get the idea.  The Egyptian Museum was one of the first museums in human history designed for the purpose of displaying artifacts.  And people hated it.  They were like, ‘Why did they put a bunch of statues into this train station?  Is this a joke?’  They were also wrong.  The museum’s design was purposeful – it was meant to be a stark, masculine place that drew the focus onto the pieces rather than onto the wallpaper.  I am inordinately fond of the place – but of course I would be.

The Egyptian Museum is also the perfect starting point to get to know the more European neighborhoods that were in vogue in Albion’s time.   Cairo was originally built by the Arabs, later ruled by the Mamluks and the Ottomans, and those eras can all be seen in Old Cairo.  By Albion’s time, though, the European influence was in full swing.  It started with a crush.  In 1869, to commemorate the opening of the Suez Canal, Ismail Pasha invited Empress Eugenie of France to join in the festivities, and built a palace for her to stay in for the duration of her visit (The Gezira Palace, now operating as a Marriott Hotel).  He was so smitten with her that there’s an anecdote about her chamber pots.  He had eyes hand-painted in the base of them, so that when she crouched down, she would understand his eyes were always on her, and he liked what he saw. 

The neighborhoods surrounding the Egyptian Museum resemble Paris more than they resemble Cairo.  This was done purposefully – Ismail Pasha employed architects who worked in Paris, and encouraged Parisian tropes such as boulevards and city squares.  In 1902, this part of the city would have been extraordinarily beautiful and quite new, but there is no question that downtown Cairo was a contributing factor in British takeover as well.  Ismail Pasha wasn’t great about budgeting his visions, and it cost him Egypt.  Once Egypt was bankrupt due to his visions of a more modern Cairo, the British were able to justify a takeover in 1882, and Britain and France are still running the show in 1902 when Albion steps onto the scene.

The books in the Dead Egyptians series will cover the rise of Egyptian Nationalism leading to Egypt’s independence from Britain in 1922, and a little further beyond.  I will take the reader through every event and every hamlet to do so.  But for now, enjoy book one, which is definitely the Cairo book.  And go and see Albion’s house, for goodness’ sake.  There is treasure in Egypt, and it’s not the treasure.