Travel to Cairo

Cairo earns its epithet ‘the city of a thousand minarets’ honestly—the skyline bristles with towers spanning a millennium of Islamic architecture. Yet the city’s story predates even its 969 CE foundation by centuries. The Romans built Babylon Fortress here in the 1st century, establishing a strategic garrison at the junction of Upper and Lower Egypt. When Arab general ‘Amr ibn al-‘As conquered Egypt in 641, he founded Fustat just north of those Roman walls. Three successive capitals rose and fell on this ground—al-‘Askar in 750, al-Qata’i in 868—before Fatimid general Jawhar al-Siqilli established al-Qahira, ‘The Victorious,’ as the new seat of the Shi’a caliphate in 969.

What survives today represents an extraordinary palimpsest of power spanning every major Islamic dynasty. The Fatimids built the great Al-Azhar Mosque in 970—still functioning as one of the world’s oldest universities and a center of Sunni theological scholarship. They enclosed their royal city within stone walls whose monumental gates, Bab al-Futuh and Bab Zuweila, still stand as imposing landmarks. Saladin’s Ayyubid dynasty added the commanding Citadel fortress in 1176 atop the Mokattam hills. The Mamluks, former slave-soldiers who seized power in 1250, transformed Cairo into the largest and wealthiest city in the medieval world outside China, adorning it with monuments of unprecedented sophistication. UNESCO inscribed Historic Cairo as a World Heritage Site in 1979.

Al-Muizz Street—named for the Fatimid caliph who commissioned Cairo—stretches just one kilometer from Bab al-Futuh to Bab Zuweila, yet contains the highest concentration of medieval Islamic architecture found anywhere on earth. Walking this pedestrian thoroughfare transports visitors through layered centuries of construction and renovation: 10th-century Fatimid mosques with intricate geometric stucco work that influenced decorative traditions across the Islamic world, 13th-century Mamluk complexes combining religious schools with soaring mausoleums topped by elaborate carved stone domes, and 18th-century Ottoman sebils—ornate public drinking fountains with distinctive fluted domes that served as acts of charitable devotion and architectural display for the empire’s provincial governors.

The street pulses with living culture rather than museum silence. Craftsmen hammer copper in workshops their families have occupied for generations, continuing metalworking traditions dating to the medieval period. Spice merchants weigh fragrant blends in the same manner their predecessors did when the great traveler Ibn Battuta visited in the 1320s, recording Cairo as the world’s most magnificent city. At El-Fishawi cafe, patrons have sipped Arabic coffee beneath ornate mirrors since 1773—Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz wrote from these tables. The adjacent Khan el-Khalili bazaar, established in 1382 by Mamluk amir Djaharks el-Khalili, remains one of Africa’s oldest and largest continuous markets.

Cairo’s religious heritage transcends its Islamic fame, encompassing some of Christianity’s and Judaism’s most historically significant sites. In the district known as Coptic Cairo, the Hanging Church—properly called Saint Virgin Mary’s Coptic Orthodox Church—has stood since at least the 5th century, its nave suspended dramatically above the gatehouse of the Roman Babylon Fortress. This church served as the seat of the Coptic Orthodox Pope from the 7th to 13th centuries, and its wooden ceiling, shaped like an inverted Noah’s Ark, shelters 110 icons including the treasured 8th-century work known as the ‘Coptic Mona Lisa.’ Nearby, Saints Sergius and Bacchus Church marks the cave where tradition holds the Holy Family sheltered during their flight into Egypt.

The Jewish presence in Cairo dates back equally far, leaving indelible marks on world scholarship. The Ben Ezra Synagogue, reconstructed in the 12th century on a site dating to the 9th, yielded one of history’s great manuscript discoveries: the Cairo Geniza, some 300,000 documents spanning a millennium of Jewish life across the medieval Mediterranean world. From the Fatimid Al-Azhar that sparked an Islamic intellectual renaissance to the 14th-century Sultan Hassan Mosque—widely considered Egypt’s finest example of Islamic architecture with its soaring 68-meter minaret—Cairo’s monuments speak to humanity’s spiritual aspirations across faiths and centuries, coexisting within walking distance of one another.