One of the most appealing aspects of Cairo is that a large part of it is a living museum. Jenny Jobbins visits a small corner where it has been "business as usual" for 900 years Cairo's medieval core is not a reproduction of a museum staffed by costumed vacationing students, but a thriving community carrying out many of the same vital activities in the 21st century as it did in the Middle Ages. This historic storehouse has been Cairo's artisan and commercial centre for almost a thousand years. Here masharabiya (wooden screen work) is turned, tents and canopies stitched, spices traded. For centuries foreign merchants have ended their long journey overland or by river by carrying their goods and produce into the midst of this hub to be sold or bartered, the final step for the merchandise before going on sale in the marketplace -- the souq, or bazaar. Visiting merchants needed a place to stay, to conduct business, and to store their goods and stable their animals. On entering the city they would make their way to a wakala or khan, known elsewhere as a caravanserai, which usually had rooms on more than one storey opening out onto a courtyard (a design not unlike many modern motels). Several of these inns still exist, not serving their original function but used mainly for workshops and local housing. Most, in common with other Islamic buildings, have fallen into disrepair, much damaged by careless use and rising groundwater. Fortunately, in recent years attention has been drawn to the plight of Cairo's historic Islamic monuments, many of them architectural gems, and the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) has been supervising efforts -- largely funded by international agencies -- to reinstate them. One such complex is the Wakala of Nafisa El-Bayda on the corner of Al-Sukariya ("Sugar Street") and Moiz'liddin Allah (popularly known as the "Tentmakers' Street") near the southern walls of the old Fatimid City, the façade of which has been painstakingly restored by a team from the Egyptian Antiquities Project of the American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE) with funding from USAID and full cooperation of the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA). Sugar Street was famously commemorated in Naguib Mahfouz's novel. The wakala and the handsome sabil-kuttab (fountain school) built on one corner of it by the same benefactress, and also recently restored, was painted by David Roberts and has been the subject of countless tourist snapshots. The wakala is known as "the wakala of the Wax Candles", and Cairenes have been coming here since the Middle Ages to buy candles for birth and wedding celebrations. Perhaps it was no accident that the wakala was also for centuries known for its sweets -- hence "Sugar Street" -- which are also purchased for these occasions. The graceful and harmonious façade of the wakala, with its stately doorway and masharabiya-screened windows, was modelled by Nafisa El- Bayda in 1796. Nafisa, whose name means "White Jewel", was a former Anatolian slave who was fortunate enough to make two good marriages that helped her on the way to fortune. She herself was clearly blessed with charm, intelligence and an instinct for survival that carried her through a time when the Mameluke class into which she had been enslaved was being brought down and crushed, first by the French and then the Anglo-Turkish occupations. When her second husband, Ali Bey El-Kebir, died, she inherited a vast estate. The day after Ali's death she married another important Mameluke, Murad. The two amassed property in Cairo and grew immensely rich. They were said to have a private army of 300 Mamelukes. In 1791 Nafisa set up a waqf, which entrusted her property to the stewardship of the Muslim faith. She bought the wakala on the corner of Sugar Street room by room, and in 1796, when she had acquired the whole building, she gave it a fashionable new façade and endowed it with a sabil- kuttab on the southwest corner to provide water to local residents and passers-by and a centre for boys to learn the Qur'an. Two years later Murad and his army joined the defending forces at the Battle of the Pyramids to face Napoleon. The Mamelukes were routed, and Murad fled with other survivors to Upper Egypt. Nafisa, meanwhile, made a show of courting the French, even entertaining Napoleon to dinner and exchanging gifts -- he gave her a diamond-studded watch which she was later forced to return, perhaps proving that the French Emperor was not above being an "Indian gift" giver. When the Anglo-Turkish alliance threatened to overthrow the French, however, Nafisa tried to broker a deal between the French and her husband. Unfortunately, Murad died of plague and Nafisa was left to face Mohamed Ali alone. Under the new regime she lost everything, and the "Mother of the Mamelukes" died in poverty in 1816. Yet despite her reduced circumstances Nafisa had survived; her strategy was shrewd and her business acumen acute. She could clearly spot a good buy in the property market. There is evidence that the wakala had been standing since the 12th century, and under Nafisa's ownership business within its walls carried on much as it had for the previous 600 years. Merchants bartered, ate, slept and waited anxiously for promised credits. The inner buildings and the original courtyard -- now built up with informal workshops and housing, though several trees still thrive -- were not part of Nafisa's restoration plan, and, as the director of the conservation project Agnieszka Dobrowolska says, they were not part of the recent conservation plan for the building. Dobrowolska's project was to restore Nafisa's elegant façade and gateway, although she would love to see the whole building conserved. "There are immense possibilities for a wonderful project," she says. However she admits that funding would be hard to come by. "It would be lengthy, complicated and extremely expensive." This is one of several projects in which Dobrowolska has been involved since she began her work with ARCE in 1995. The main reason why many of these monuments face problems, she says, is that they were not built on solid ground. "The subsoil is why buildings fall down, even when they are only 200 years old," she says. "They are sitting on seven metres of 'fill'." In other words, solid earth lies way below the surface, and is overlaid by layer upon layer of masonry, litter and other debris. Fortunately Dobrowolska trained both as an engineer and an architect, so she is well able to identify structural as well as conservation problems. She came to Egypt 10 years ago to work for the Polish Centre for Medieval Archaeology and spent two years working at the Eastern Cemetery on the restoration of the complex of Emir Kebir before being awarded a competitive grant from ARCE. Her husband is the artist and conservationist Jaroslaw Dobrowolski. "This is heaven for conservation programmes," she says. "You can still find craftsmen who grew up with the same tools used in the original construction. You can still find people as skilled as they were then. It hasn't changed since the Middle Ages." They are adept at learning new skills. "The carpenter has learnt how to read technical drawings," she says. She has also come to recognise the signatures of earlier craftsmen who frequently left a distinctive mark to show which individual completed a particular piece of work. In between the skilled artisans of yesterday and today, though, "there was a time went standards went down." The facelift of Nafisa's façade, which Dobrowolksa describes as "deep in the Mameluke architectural tradition", was completed just recently after a year of "complicated" work by a team that included conservationists from France. The masharabiya screens and exterior wall plaster were cleaned but only essential missing pieces were substituted, thus leaving intact as much of the original as possible. "We only fix, we don't replace unless it's necessary," Dobrowolska says. "We don't make things look new. We don't remove the patina." The limestone gateway yielded both some exciting surprises and a structural challenge. First, two centuries of squashed litter had raised the street level so that it was 90 centimetres higher than the original passageway. The heavy, iron studded gates had not been closed for generations, and their feet were buried and partly rotted. Here the people's needs had to be brought into account. "The community are part of its structure and history," Dobrowolska says, adding: "The gateway was built for a camel, but it had been a long time since a camel passed between the doors. So the question was put to the residents and artisans of the wakala: what were their feelings about lowering the passageway to its original level? The answer was yes, that they wished this to be done, even though it meant carrying heavy loads up and down a flight of steps. Lowering the floor revealed a surprise. On either side of the gate was a stone mastaba, long buried. And it was once again possible to open and close the doors, which are older than Nafisa's decorations, probably dating from the 15th or 16th century, and which she adapted for her own project. The doors proved to have a few pulled teeth studded into them, perhaps as a token of thanks for relief of toothache. But the vaulted roof of the passage needed attention. It was not far from collapse, and the best remedy was to dismantle and rebuild it stone by stone. An elderly resident who lived above refused an offer of temporary refuge and stayed put while the rebuilding was going on. The ceilings inside the structure were stained black with the smoke from candle making, which was removed manually with a lime treatment and surgical scalpels. The original courtyard is built up with workshops and makeshift housing but in a sad state of repair. Gabr Said has been selling tea at his stall there for 48 years, and proudly displays photos taken over the years of himself and his polished brass kettles. Nearby at the wax makers, owner Mustafa Hussein sat outside his shop while his assistant dipped one after another of double rows of white candles into a hot vat to add another coat of wax. Hussein used to work in Saudi Arabia. "I came back here to take over the family business," he says. This impressive gateway was for goods and beasts: the entrance to the living quarters of the wakala was around the corner in Sugar Street. The rooms that once stood around the courtyard are now residential apartments livened with lines of colourful washing. Residents greet Dobrowolska warmly and tell her their latest news, mainly concerning a halt to their water supply. A black cat sits on a wall: when an elderly man mounts the steps with a jerry can of water she jumps up and follows him through his front door. Plaster is crumbling, exposing original beams. A conservation project, though welcome, would be a huge undertaking and funding is unlikely to come in time to save all of the building. Meanwhile life in the "Wakala of the Wax Candles" goes on. "What's charming about Cairo is that it hasn't changed since the Middle Ages," Dobrowolska says. "Only that the camels have been replaced with Suzukis."
