City

Cairo

Cairo is twenty million people layered over five thousand years, a city where Pharaonic columns prop up medieval mosques and 1950s apartment blocks lean over alleyways older than most European nations. Naguib Mahfouz spent a lifetime mapping its lanes — the coffeehouses of Khan el-Khalili, the tenements of Midaq Alley, the feudal passions behind shuttered mashrabiya screens — and won a Nobel Prize for making the world care about a single Cairo neighborhood as much as it cared about its pyramids.

Last updated 3 weeks ago