Khan el-Khalili

A dense grid of covered lanes north-east of al-Azhar, trading continuously since the 14th century. The outer streets are frankly aimed at visitors — papyrus, cartouches, alabaster — but turn two corners inward and it becomes a working market where Cairo actually buys things.

How it is organised

Like most medieval markets it is grouped by trade, and knowing that turns a confusing maze into a map:

• Coppersmiths and metalworkers — you will hear them before you see them
• Goldsmiths, in their own tight quarter, sold by weight against the daily rate
• Spice and herb merchants, with hibiscus, cumin and dried limes in open sacks
• Perfumers selling essential oils by the gram
• Textile and tentmakers towards the Street of the Tentmakers, south past Bab Zuweila

Where to stop

El Fishawy, open in one form or another for well over two centuries, is the traditional coffee house in the middle of it all — mint tea, mirrored walls, and a steady procession of hawkers. It is touristy and worth doing anyway.

Haggling

Expected, and friendly. Open well below the asking price, settle somewhere near the middle, and walk away without hard feelings if it does not land. Fixed-price shops exist and say so.

The bazaar takes its name from Amir Jaharkas al-Khalili, a Mamluk master of horse who in 1382 built a large khan — a caravanserai, with storerooms below and lodging above — on this spot. Merchant caravans arriving in Cairo unloaded, stored and slept there, and the market grew up around the trade.

What he built on was not empty ground. The site had held the Fatimid mausoleum of the caliphs, and clearing it for a commercial building was a deliberate erasure by the Mamluk regime of the dynasty it had replaced.

The crossroads

For centuries this was one of the great trading hubs between the Mediterranean, Africa and Asia. Spices and textiles came up the Red Sea from India, gold and ivory north from Sudan, and European merchants came south to meet them. Cairo's wealth in the late medieval period was built substantially on being the place where those routes met — and this market is what that looked like on the ground.

Still a workshop

What separates Khan el-Khalili from a tourist bazaar is that things are still made here. Behind the shopfronts are workshops where copper is beaten, glass is blown from recycled bottles into the blue-green muski ware, and inlay is cut by hand. Several of those crafts survive commercially almost nowhere else in Egypt, and the market is the reason they persist.