Mosque of Ibn Tulun

The oldest mosque in Cairo surviving in anything like its original form, and by area the largest in the city. It is also the emptiest — a vast open courtyard the size of a football pitch, surrounded by arcades, with almost nothing in it. After the density of the medieval streets outside, the effect is startling.

It is built of fired brick rather than stone, faced in carved stucco, and the decoration is all in the geometry: pointed arches on rectangular piers, more than a hundred windows each with a different grille pattern, and a crenellation along the parapet cut into shapes that look like rows of paper figures holding hands.

The minaret

Unique in Egypt: a spiral staircase on the outside of the tower, winding up around it. It echoes the great minaret at Samarra in Iraq, where Ibn Tulun grew up. You can climb it, and the view over the roofs to the Citadel is the best reason to.

Next door

The Gayer-Anderson Museum occupies two merged 16th- and 17th-century houses built against the mosque wall — furnished interiors, screened balconies and a beautiful reception room with a fountain. It is one of the best-preserved domestic buildings in Cairo and takes twenty minutes.

Ahmad ibn Tulun was sent from Samarra in 868 CE as governor of Egypt on behalf of the Abbasid caliphs. He arrived as an administrator and within a few years was running the country as an independent ruler in all but name, keeping the revenue that had previously gone to Baghdad.

He built a new capital, al-Qata'i, north-east of the existing settlements, with a palace, a hippodrome and this mosque at its centre, completed in 879. The dynasty he founded lasted barely forty years, and when the Abbasids retook Egypt in 905 they levelled al-Qata'i completely.

They left the mosque. It is the only thing standing from an entire vanished capital city.

Legends attached

Local tradition claims the hill it stands on is where Noah's ark came to rest, and that Moses confronted Pharaoh's magicians here. Neither is historical, and both indicate how long the site has felt significant.

Restored, and filmed

The mosque was repaired under the Mamluks — the fountain in the courtyard is a 13th-century addition — and heavily restored in the 20th century. Its unusual emptiness and geometry have made it a favourite film location; among other things, it stood in for a Cairo setting in a James Bond film in the 1970s.