Save the Citadel, cries Egypt’s chief archaeologist
A proposed new financial complex in Cairo threatens to block the view of the Citadel, part of Medieval Cairo and one of the most popular tourist attractions. The 12th century warrior sultan Salaheddin started fortification works on this 75 meter (250 feet) high plateau in the 1170s, to protect the city from the Crusaders. It stopped being the seat of government when Egypt’s ruler, Khedive Ismail, moved to his newly built Abdin Palace in the Ismailiya neighborhood in the 1860s. Its most striking feature today is the Alabaster Mosque of Muhammad Ali, built in the Ottoman style between 1830 and 1857. The citadel also contains Al-Gawhara palace, the National Military Museum and the Police Museum.
UNESCO has recommended the height of the buildings known as the Cairo Financial Center, which would include shops, offices, a five-star hotel, an exhibition and conference centre and an entertainment centre, should be reduced to 31.55 meters from 59.5 meters so they do not protrude above the enclosing wall of the Citadel. That would mean shaving off the top five floors of a planned hotel and the top six floors of an office block, the government says.
The developers of the project said they were committed to the decisions of U.N. cultural body and were studying ways to find “the best way to implement them with the least losses”. Egypt’s chief archaeologist Zahi Hawass, head of the Supreme Council for Antiquities, said the original plans for the financial complex were unacceptable because they would damage the view of the medieval fortress that was the seat of government in Egypt for centuries.
http://africa.reuters.com/country/EG/news/usnL27902565.html
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