Blooming In Cairo

But there was a problem. While the Cairo police horses could be moved to greener pastures with relative ease, three giant water reservoirs—each 80 meters (260') in diameter and 14 meters (46') deep—were slated to be installed in al-Darassa to provide much-needed drinking water for Greater Cairo. Undaunted, the planners decided to lay out the new park over the covers of the new water reservoirs, which thus had to be completed before work on the new park could begin.

With the assistance of Sasaki Associates of Boston, developers created a new master plan before the reservoirs were completed in 1995. The park would be built on a grand scale, based on the traditional Islamic gardens of the past: There would be shaded takhtaboush sitting areas, Persian and Timurid elements in the park’s water channels and a bustan, or orchard.

In 1996, the police horses were sent packing and the Cairo Governorate released the site to the Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKTC). The project grew to include rehabilitation of the Darb al-Ahmar district immediately to the west as well as the restoration of several important monuments on the skyline of the old city: the 14th-century Um Sultan Shaaban Mosque and the Khayrbek Complex, which includes a 13th-century palace, a mosque and an Ottoman-era house. A school and 19 residences were also embraced in the project, and parallel social-development schemes involved a housing-credit plan and a microfinance program that gave local residents opportunities to restore their own houses and start small businesses. The trust had done similar projects in Hunza in Pakistan, in Samarkand and in Zanzibar, but this was its biggest and most complex undertaking ever.

In 1997, a team of Egyptian, French, Italian and American architects, engineers and landscape and horticultural specialists started work on the park. A fleet of earth-moving machines began the job of carting away 500 years of rubble —tens of thousands of truckloads amounting to more than 1.5 million cubic meters (1.96 million cu yd)—more than half the volume of the Great Pyramid. Then the excavators made a most unexpected discovery. On the west flank of al-Darassa, under rubbish mounds 30 meters (100') deep, they uncovered a totally buried section of the 12th-century Ayyubid wall built to protect Cairo, complete with its gates, towers, interior chambers, passageways and galleries. The AKTC called the find “one of the most important archeological discoveries of the past decades” relating to medieval Egypt. Plans were changed to incorporate the newly discovered wall into a broader project: It would be restored and used to both set off and link the new park and the old Ayyubid city.

Water, of course, was a key aspect of the project. The builders of the big Mughal gardens of India which, like the new Al-Azhar Park, covered whole hillsides, had paid careful attention to this. Luckily, a large-diameter water pipeline passed nearby that carried water from the Nile to an agricultural area, and a new spur was built to the park site. Agricultural soil and sand were trucked in.