Someone is going out in style in what must be a Christian funeral, the carriage decked with a cross and angels, moving past a mosque! This is the first mosque built in Heliopolis, the present-day outer suburb of Cairo which the Belgian Baron Empain built out of the desert in the early 1900s. The mosque was built in 1911 in Mosque Square (Midan al-Gami).
The photo shows a pretty blend of Islamic and Christian ‘architectural’ embellishment, particularly the rooftops, the parts closest to heaven… I also couldn’t help noticing the Egyptian religious tolerance of the 1940s.
Here in Canberra the temperatures have been in the high 30s lately, but rather than shooting this summery city for the photo challenge, I’ll draw on my father’s pictorial resources from Egypt.
A photo of a kind of swimming competition in the river – it looks a bit painful, and I’m not sure how you win:
Swimming inland, Egypt, 1941
And a drawing of soldiers under the blazing desert sun, probably up to no good:
But since my source of photos is from Egypt, an ancient country where rain falls little and seldom, I thought of the two photos here below that show ingenious methods of sustaining life in a dry land. During the Hellenistic era (333 – 30 BC) two technological devices were invented to transfer water to farmlands from the Nile or from underground wells fed by the Nile. The first photo is of a saqiya or Persian water-wheel, a machine which freed up human labour for tasks other than manually carrying buckets of water from the Nile to the crops, or lifting buckets of water from the river and pouring it into a channel. The saqiya uses animal power: bullocks, buffalo, donkeys, camels or cows, which tread circles around the horizontal wheel, turning the vertical wheel connected to the clay-pot laden wheel. The pots are positioned on a set of ropes so they tilt forward when they rise out of the well and empty into a trough before descending into the well to fill again.
Thousands of saqiyas are still in use today in Egypt.
Irrigation, Egypt, c1941
In the second photo, a device called a tambour, or Archimedes Screw, consists of a large tube inside which a spiral chamber turns and scoops up water when rotated by a handle. The water travels up the length of the screw chamber and is poured out the top of the tube into irrigation channels. Its inventor, Archimedes, is said to have been the first to use the water screw, in 230 BC. This technology is now rare in Egypt but is still used for irrigation in other parts of the world.
Ailsa has posted some photos of misty, mysterious and mystical forests that stopped her in her tracks: http://wheresmybackpack.com/2012/11/16/travel-theme-mystical/. She succumbed to the temptation to capture a scene that can’t quite be explained, as did the man behind the camera in Fort Capuzzo, below.
In 1940, when Libya was still an Italian colony, this frontier fort on the Libyan-Egyptian border was bombarded into the pitiful state you see in the photo below. In 1940 and 1941, Fort Capuzzo changed hands seven times back and forth between the allied and axis forces, finally falling to New Zealand troops who captured it for the last time in November 1941.
In the little grotto, a statue of Mary survived the beatings. Whether the photographer was Catholic or not, he evidently found her survival mysterious, hard to explain. So do I.
Another photo from my father’s World War 2 album: it’s not a sharp image, but it’s about renewal, and that’s what matters.
During the presence of Australian troops in Egypt, house boats on the River Nile were used for officers convalescing or on leave. Earlier this year I posted a photo of Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo where officers also spent time relaxing and renewing their spirits. On the same theme, Dad wrote a poem about time-out for officers and privates, called Seven Days’ Leave, a few verses of which I posted here.
As the Nile flows through Cairo it is divided in two for a short space by Gezira Island. And on this island there’s a public green space with a geometric layout called the Andalusian Garden. It was designed by the architect Mahmoud Zulfiqar Bey in 1929 as a gift to his wife, and was originally used as a roller skating rink by members of the royal family. In 1935 it was opened to the public, and in 1941 when my father was in Cairo during the war he visited this Moorish garden. The park is now protected by a heritage classification. Unfortunately the pool in the photo is now dry, but the terraces are still decorated with coloured mosaics which are not evident in this black and white photo, but photos on this blog site show the beautiful colours of the tiles and the excellent design of the garden.
Thank you Ahmad Omar for telling me the name of this garden. The photo is from my father’s collection which he brought back from Egypt in 1942.
Andalusian Garden, Gezira Island, Cairo, Egypt, 1941
When I saw the themes for this week’s photo challenges, Foreign (WordPress weekly challenge) and Spooky (Ailsa’s travel photo challenge), I knew exactly which photos I wanted to submit. They’ve given me the creeps since I was a child paging through my father’s war album from the Middle East. While I’d linger over photos of pyramids, camels and Arabs, I’d glance quickly at these two, shiver, and turn the page.
The Foreign theme: The photos are owned by me, an Australian, and it depicts a palace built in Egypt in Hindu-style architecture designed by a Frenchman for a Belgian, Baron Empain. The architect, Alexandre Marcel, was inspired by the temples of Orissa in India and Angkor Wat in Cambodia. The palace’s sculptures of Hindu divinities, mythical creatures and erotic French maidens are so out of place in this Muslim country that they attract the attention of looters and vandals. The palace is in Heliopolis, now a suburb of Cairo, but at the time of building, between 1907 and 1911, it was a town apart, designed by the Baron out of a stretch of desert he bought from the British colonial government. The Baron is buried under the Catholic basilica in Heliopolis, also commissioned by him, which you can see in a previous post.
The Spooky theme: Where do I begin? Both the interior and exterior of this reinforced concrete structure are crumbling and graffitied. Once decorated by Georges-Louis Claude in the French style, it had frescoes, parquet floors, gilded ceilings, gold-plated doorknobs, Belgian mirrors, and a spiral staircase in a tower sitting on a revolving base. It must have been beautiful. Now it’s bare, the only inhabitants bats and stray dogs. And ghosts. Not only is the palace said to be haunted, but some say Satanic rituals are practised there and that some of the mirrors are stained with blood. The Baron’s sister died when she fell from the tower and his psychologically disturbed daughter died in one of the basement chambers.
Its dark history has kept the palace closed to the public. Since 2005 it has been owned by the Egyptian government which has made a few attempts to find restorers, but plans have always come to nothing. This year, however, the government announced a definite restoration project to transform the palace into a cultural centre…
When my father was in the Middle East he was surrounded by men and nurses. Mostly men. Sometimes they were soldiers in a war; sometimes they were larrikins. (The Australian Oxford Dictionary’s definition of larrikin is ‘a person who acts with apparent disregard for social or political conventions’.)
These soldiers look like they’re on a roof. Don’t tell me they’re acting as Bathsheba bathing on the roof and King David wooing her with his flute! Well, then, they’re imitating one of history’s most famous couples. I seem to remember that Bathsheba was beautiful…
