A walled compound inside a Roman fortress holding a church on stilts, a synagogue, and a crypt where the Holy Family is said to have sheltered.
This is the oldest continuously inhabited part of Cairo, older than Cairo itself. The Romans built the fortress of Babylon here around 300 AD, controlling the point where the Nile met a canal to the Red Sea, and the Christian community settled inside and around its walls.
Two round bastions of the fortress still stand at the entrance, and much of what you walk through is built on top of Roman masonry — which is why the ground level inside is several metres below the modern street.
The Hanging Church
Al-Mu’allaqa, the Hanging Church, is suspended over the water gate of the Roman fortress, its nave built across the gap between two bastions. A section of glass floor lets you see down into the void beneath.
It dates in its present form from the ninth century with much later rebuilding, and it was the seat of the Coptic Pope for several centuries. The interior has a marble pulpit on thirteen slender columns — Christ and the apostles — and screens of ebony inlaid with ivory.
Abu Serga
The Church of Saints Sergius and Bacchus, from about the fourth century and one of the oldest in Egypt. Below it is a crypt where, according to Coptic tradition, the Holy Family sheltered during the flight into Egypt.
The crypt floods periodically with groundwater and access depends on conditions. The tradition itself is central to Egyptian Christianity — there is a whole pilgrimage route across Egypt following the supposed journey.
The Ben Ezra Synagogue
A synagogue since the ninth century, on a site tradition places as where the infant Moses was found, and rebuilt in the nineteenth.
Its importance is the Cairo Geniza. A geniza is a storeroom for worn documents bearing God’s name, which cannot be destroyed. This one was sealed and forgotten, and when it was opened in the late nineteenth century it held around 400,000 fragments — letters, contracts, court records, shopping lists, poems — covering a thousand years of Jewish life in the Mediterranean.
It transformed the study of the medieval Islamic world. Most of the material is now at Cambridge.
Egypt’s Jewish community, which numbered around 80,000 in the 1940s, is now a handful of people. The synagogue is maintained as a monument.
Also here
St George’s, the Greek Orthodox church, round in plan, built on a Roman tower. The Convent of St George. The Coptic Museum — see its own entry.
The Mosque of Amr ibn al-As, a short walk away, is the oldest mosque in Africa, founded in 641, though almost nothing original survives.
Practicalities
Free to enter the churches; the museum is ticketed. Security at the compound gate with bag checks.
Modest dress — shoulders and knees covered for everyone. Photography inside churches is restricted and sometimes forbidden.
Churches close in the early afternoon, earlier than most Cairo sites. Go in the morning.
More History
Al-Muizz Street
A kilometre of medieval Cairo with the densest concentration of Islamic architecture in the world, pedestrianised and lit at night.
The City of the Dead
A necropolis several kilometres long where Mamluk sultans are buried and living families have made homes among the tombs.