Coptic Cairo

A small walled quarter in Old Cairo, built inside and on top of the Roman fortress of Babylon, where a church, a synagogue and a mosque stand within a few minutes' walk of each other — all of them still in use. The lanes are narrow, shaded and paved, and the whole district takes an unhurried couple of hours.

Inside the walls

• The Hanging Church, suspended over the fortress gatehouse, with a glass floor panel above the drop
• The Church of St Sergius and Bacchus, built over a crypt where tradition holds the Holy Family sheltered during the flight into Egypt
• The Ben Ezra Synagogue — restored, quiet, and the source of one of the great documentary discoveries in history
• The Coptic Museum, with the finest collection of Coptic art anywhere: textiles, woodwork and carved stone from the centuries between the pharaohs and Islam
• Two Roman towers of the original fortress, still standing at the entrance

The fortress came first. Babylon-in-Egypt guarded the point where the Nile met the canal to the Red Sea, and the Emperor Trajan rebuilt it around the beginning of the 2nd century CE. When the Arab army arrived in 641 they founded their new city, Fustat, just outside its walls — so Cairo effectively grew outward from this spot.

Egypt's Christian community had been established here for centuries by then, and the quarter remained a Coptic centre through every subsequent change of ruler.

The Geniza

The Ben Ezra Synagogue held a geniza — a storeroom for worn-out documents, which under Jewish law cannot simply be destroyed if they might carry the name of God. For roughly a thousand years the community put its papers there and left them: not only prayer books but shopping lists, marriage contracts, court records, children's writing exercises, business letters from as far as India.

The dry Cairo air preserved almost all of it. In 1896 the Cambridge scholar Solomon Schechter was shown fragments from the chamber, recognised what they were, and shipped out something approaching 200,000 pieces. The Cairo Geniza rewrote the social and economic history of the medieval Mediterranean — an entire world reconstructed from the paperwork that nobody thought to keep and nobody was allowed to throw away.