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When Mohammed Ali created a military high road to link the Citadel with Cairo's new railway station, and named it after the French physician Antoine Clot - whom he ennobled for introducing Western ideas of public health to Egypt - nobody foresaw that Sharia Clot Bey and the fashionable area north of Ezbekiya would degenerate into a vice-ridden "Open Land". By World War I, however, the quarter was full of honky-tonk bars, backstreet porn shows and brothels; shacks and plush establishments alike paying tribute to Ibrahim el-Gharby, the fearsome transvestite "King of the Wasa'a ". (In the Mahfouz novel and classic Egyptian movie The Beginning and the End, the main character's hash-dealing brother set up shop here.) During World War II, activities centred around Wagh el-Birket, known to troops as " the Berka ": a long street with curtained alleys leading off beneath balconies where the prostitutes sat fanning themselves. Only after the killing of two Australian soldiers (who were notorious for throwing women and pianos out of windows) was the Berka closed down in 1942. Nowadays shabbily respectable, with cheap shops and cafes, this past has been further effaced by renaming Clot Bey Sharia Khulud . Any bus heading up it from the gardens towards Ramses will take you past the hulking nineteenth-century Cathedral of St Mark , now superseded by the new Coptic cathedral in Abbassiya. The derelict Moorish pile at the Ramses end of Sharia el-Gumhorriya (which runs up from the west side of the gardens) was the original premises of Al-Ahram (The Pyramids), the first - if not still the foremost - newspaper in the Arab world.
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