Ottoman Cairo's ghosts hold delightful secrets, a renowned architect tells Gamal Nkrumah Agnieszka Dobrowolska, a conservation architect, travels, often alone or in the company of her co-worker and architectural partner, her husband Jaroslaw Dobrowolski -- author of The Living Stones of Cairo -- to bring back intriguing tales of magnificent buildings that she often restores to a semblance of their original sublimity and resplendence. Together, they authored numerous works including Heliopolis: Rebirth of the City of the Sun. The couple is off to Dongola, Sudan, later in February. Convivial and not averse to a witticism, with a light touch and a clear ear, she had spent at least 15 years in chronicling, conserving and restoring the architectural treasures of Egypt. As an architect, she never planned for a career in conservation. Ever since her Egyptian sojourn, her work and the rich architectural heritage of Egypt have moved in tandem with her life. Moreover, she has a fine ear for conversation and a taste for the historical, and in particular constructions constituting or chronicling history. According to Agnieszka Dobrowolska the "Ottoman Sultan Mustafa III desired an unequivocal architectural statement that asserted his imperial authority in Cairo. But why did he decide to do that by erecting a building quite different from anything built at the time in Istanbul?" "By the mid-18th century, resigned over a troubled and weakened empire, Sultan Mustafa III could only dream of matching the architectural achievements of the Ottoman glory days in magnitude. Still, he was a dedicated patron of architecture," Dobrowolska told Al-Ahram Weekly. "There is a touchingly human aspect to the fact that as soon as he began his reign in 1757, he ordered the erection of a mosque commemorating his late mother," she added. "The dome of the mosque, in the fashionable Ottoman Baroque style of the day, sits graciously on a hilltop above the Usudar district in Istanbul's Asian section, overlooking the mouth of the Bosphorus and the Sea of Marmara. The fine marble mosaic inlay decorating the internal gallery in the mosque and the imported Chinese tiles used elsewhere in the building indicate that good-quality, locally produced wall tiles were no longer available," Dobrowolska extrapolated. She highlights the fact that the importation of high quality tiles from distant lands was all in vogue in that particular period of Ottoman architectural renaissance. Ottoman architecture cannot but be examined in the context of the overall cultural aspect of the period. "In overall design, the Ottoman architects were concerned with balancing the open, semi-enclosed, and enclosed spaces of courtyards, porticoes, and interiors, with achieving both unity and variety in spacious dome-covered halls; and with combining a building's interior decoration, ceramic wall-tiles reigned supreme," Dobrowolska continues. "Virtually all of the tiles were produced in the kilns of Iznil in northeastern Anatolia, a city that was an important centre of pottery production long before the Ottoman conquest," she elucidates. Dobrowolska's portrait of a haunted age might be viewed as somewhat corny had she not explained the practical import, implications and applications of the changing fashions of architectural styles. Sultan Mustafa III secured the services of European generals to initiate the radical reform of the antiquated Ottoman military -- especially the infantry and artillery. His own pugnacious and venomous Jannissaries (Anatolian and Balkan Christian mercenaries recruited as child soldiers and forcibly converted to Islam), however, infuriated by his plans, fiercely resisted. Dobrowolska does not pretend to appraise Sultan Mustafa's skills as a monarch for she is an architect, not a historian. The intriguing question, however, is whether he dispatched the Dutch ceramic blue and white tiles to Cairo because he did not like them or whether it was because he wanted to impress the Egyptians with them. "In 1759, Sultan Mustafa III apparently found nothing wrong in the local flavouring to his political statement in architectural form. But the bowed fa��ade of his sabil is purely Ottoman in style, even though it is surmounted in Cairene fashion with a kuttab," Dobrowolska scrutinises the curious building which is the focus of her book. Whatever it is, the sabil-kuttab described by Dobrowolska was constructed in the spirit of its time. We do know that Sultan Mustafa III wanted to modernise his empire bringing it into line with the Powers of Europe. That detail alone cuts deep. We also know that his wife Valide Sultan Mihr-i-Shah was a native of Genoa, and that perhaps he was infatuated with Western European tastes and fashion, and she may have influenced him. But the Genoese had no tradition of producing blue and white Dutch Delft tiles, and he may have preferred the traditional vivid, colourful and psychedelic Turkish tiles. Scenes of the idyllic Dutch rural setting must have seemed unfamiliar to both Turks and Egyptians. "Wall tiles produced in Delft workshops adorned the houses of New Amsterdam, now New York, and were popular the world over. They also found their way to Istanbul and Cairo. So great was the demand that the estimated number of Dutch wall tiles produced in two hundred years was an astonishing eight hundred million." Dobrowolska explains that the design of the Mameluk sabils were quite different from the Ottoman ones. But the impetus to build a sabil was the same. The structure conveyed the sense that the wealthy ruler or merchant who commissioned the construction of the sabil wanted to impress upon the people his own benevolence. However, the provision of a sabil was likewise regarded as a display of power and authority. "The point is to ensure that everyone knows that I am the absolute ruler. I am omnipotent. This is how the rulers of the time reasoned. I provide the people with water, freely," Dobrowolska extrapolates. Interestingly enough, Dobrowolska points out that Ottoman sabils' primary function was to provide potable water. The Mameluk tradition of combining the sabil with a kuttab -- traditional Muslim school -- was a peculiarly Egyptian convention. What is interesting about Sultan Mustafa's sabil is that it was both a sabil and a kuttab as in the Mameluk as opposed to the Ottoman tradition. If this work was only a historical investigative study, it would be compelling -- but it is much more. The pages of her joint seminal work with her husband Jaroslaw Dobrowolski The Sultan's Fountain: An Imperial Story of Cairo, Istanbul, and Ankara is replete with history. "This colourful account explains the surprising story behind this unusual building," head of the Netherlands-Flemish Institute tells the Weekly. "Just nine years after his cousin Sultan Mahmoud I built a taqia (a Sufi convent) and a sabil-kuttab in Cairo, Mustafa III decided to follow suit. We will probably never learn the details of his reasoning, but the sultan's motives for erecting the building, for choosing its location, and for deciding how it should look can easily be imagined," Dobrowolska expounds. "With the power of the Mameluk beylicate overshadowing the authority of the Ottoman governor, it was natural for the sultan to be eager to mark Cairo with a solid, lasting physical symbol of his suzerainty over the Egyptian province. The priority that he assigned to this project -- and not surprisingly, considering Egypt's importance for the empire -- is evident from the fact that he embarked on the task soon after ascending to the throne." Dobrowolska worked on the restoration and conservation of two other sabils in Cairo -- one in Bab Zueila and the other in Sayeda Nafisa. "Mustafa III wanted to trump that regional architectural statement with one that asserted his imperial authority in Cairo. But why did he decide to do that by erecting a building quite different from anything built at the time in Istanbul?" Mustafa III had fashioned a bouquet of these dazzling constructions in Istanbul. So this is a question that puzzles Dobrowolska. "In a feature found almost only in Cairo, sabils, the public fountains that distributed free drinking water as a charity, were combined in a single building with kuttabs, elementary schools," the author notes. "In addition to the religious merits of the charitable foundations, they commemorated the founder's name or that of a beloved deceased person while advertising the wealth, social status, and political importance of the founder," Dobrowolska stresses. "Sabil-kuttabs were increasingly built as free-standing structures by government dignitaries or exceptionally wealthy people, quite often women," Dobrowolska underscores. The Sultan's Fountain: An Imperial Story of Cairo, Istanbul and Amsterdam is a treasure trove of invaluable historical information. "By the middle of the 18th century Cairo had many sumptuous sabil-kuttabs founded by the local rich and powerful, but few structures that proclaimed the authority of the Ottoman sultans in architectural terms," Dobrowolska observes. "It appears that Mustafa III wanted to build a magnificent sabil-kuttab in the city that would outdo the local beys on their own turf," she stipulates. "This might explain why the building in Cairo is larger than Mustafa III's sabil in Istanbul, and is in fact larger than most sabils in the imperial capital," Dobrowolska notes. In this historical and primarily architectural account, the author has much to say about the social context and cultural milieu of contemporary Cairo as it pertains to the impressive sabil-kuttab of Sultan Mustafa III. she dwells at length about the character of the unique district of Sayida Zeinab elaborating eloquently the unique specificities of the part pilgrimage, part carnival, part mystic Islamic ceremony of the Sayida Zeinab moulids. "Sayida Zeinab's moulids are great social levelers. All of the usual boundaries of class and wealth are removed as doctors and lawyers mix with manual labourers, city professionals with peasant farmers, street performers with local officials. Islam's usually strict rules of gender segregation for religious events are also suspended for the moulid. On the Big Night, hundreds of thousands of revelers come from all over Cairo and from all across Egypt. Thousands of families sleep inside the mosque and in brightly coloured tents put up in the surrounding alleyways. They cook and eat there, huddled around gas lamps and kerosene stoves. In colourful marquees members of Sufi brotherhoods celebrate," Dobrowolska muses. "A moulid is also about khidma, or service, and many Sufi orders build tents where they offer free food to the poor," she concludes.
