Al-Muizz Street

A kilometre of medieval Cairo running north to south through the old Fatimid city, and by common reckoning the densest concentration of medieval Islamic architecture anywhere in the world. The central stretch is pedestrianised and lit at night, when it is at its best — the stonework warms up under the lamps and the street fills with families rather than tour groups.

Walking it

Start at Bab al-Futuh, the northern gate, and walk south. You pass, in order, the Mosque of al-Hakim; the delicate al-Aqmar Mosque of 1125, whose facade is the earliest in Cairo designed to align with the street rather than with Mecca; the Sabil-Kuttab of Abd al-Rahman Katkhuda, a fountain below and a Qur'an school above, sitting on its own island in the road; and the great complex of Sultan Qalawun.

The far end brings you to Bab Zuweila, the southern gate, whose minarets you can climb for the best rooftop view in old Cairo, and then straight into the Khan el-Khalili bazaar.

The street is as old as Cairo itself. When the Fatimid general Jawhar founded the city in 969 CE for the Caliph al-Mu'izz, he laid out a walled royal enclosure with a processional avenue running between its northern and southern gates. That avenue is this street, and it has been the city's spine ever since — the route of caliphs, sultans, funerals, guild parades and, for a thousand years, ordinary commerce.

The hospital that ran for six centuries

The Qalawun complex, begun in 1284, contained a mosque, a mausoleum, a school and a maristan — a hospital. It treated patients regardless of their ability to pay, had separate wards for different conditions including mental illness, employed musicians and storytellers as part of the care, and paid patients a small sum on discharge so they need not return to work immediately.

It kept working, in one form or another, into the twentieth century — roughly six hundred years of continuous operation on the same site.

Rescued

By the late twentieth century much of the street was structurally unsafe, its monuments buried behind workshops and rising groundwater. A long restoration through the 1990s and 2000s underpinned the buildings, removed the traffic and relaid the surface. It is a genuine conservation success, and one of the few places where the medieval city can be walked as a whole rather than visited monument by monument.