My dear friend,

The first thing you need to know about the Zamalek neighborhood is that—much like us—it’s a relatively new arrival to this ancient city. It sits on the northern half of an island called Gezira, which emerged out of mingling mudbanks in the Nile in the early 1800s. The land didn’t stabilize enough for development until the Aswan Dam began regulating the rise and fall of the river in the 1900s.

Zamalek is one of the most affluent neighborhoods in Cairo, and a favorite of European expatriates in particular. It’s home to long rows of embassies, and so, as one wanders the quiet, tree-lined streets, one is often reminded by security guards not to take photographs. Since the guards are all holding machine guns, one tends to obey.

Weapons aside, Zamalek generally feels like a respite from the noise and chaos of central Cairo—especially in spaces such as the cafeteria Granita, sprawling in the shadow of All Saints Cathedral. Although it’s nice to have a little space to breathe, it’s hard not to see Zamalek as an artificial oasis, a colonialist fantasy. The crumbling nineteenth-century villas, the art deco apartment buildings, even the trees whose shade we savor—they’re all imported, constructed on an island that only exists because of a British-built dam.

Perhaps this is why Zamalek, though beautiful, feels haunted. Hovering over the island, for instance, is the Forte Tower: an unfinished 340-room hotel that President Anwar Sadat intended to symbolize Cairo’s emergence as a powerful, fabulous global presence to rival the likes of Manhattan and Paris. But after Sadat’s assassination, the project was stalled and the single showroom was abandoned to the sand and dust. For several decades, the tower has remained one of the tallest buildings in Egypt and, as one writer describes it, “an eerie relic of the dream.”

As Mohamed Elshahed, author of the architectural study Cairo Since 1900, puts it: “This building sums up the Egyptian way… A developer gets direct permission from the president, then another president comes in with his own circle of businessmen who want a piece of the cake. The original investor says no. The project is abandoned. What kind of city is this, that allows the built environment to be shaped in such a way?”

According to Elshahed, the ancient history of this city can make it difficult to appreciate and conserve the more recent architectural and cultural wonders. In a way, I understand: What is the value of a one-hundred-year-old apartment building, no matter how lovingly or uniquely crafted, when the long shadows of the pyramids are creeping across its roof at dusk?

Indeed, one might say that the marvels of Egypt are so marvelous that they don’t require special framing or window-dressing. We’ve been to the pyramids three different times, and each time our guide simply points at the structures with little ceremony and tells us to “go take pictures.” The Egyptian Museum of Civilization is famously cluttered and disorganized (though I hear this is changing), perhaps in part because the wonders are beyond words. To me, the Museum of Modern Egyptian Art in Zamalek has a similar airy, warehouse feel: galleries are full of beautiful objects whose tags are peeling or missing key information (like the artist’s name, or the title of the piece)—and yet one doesn’t need captions or tags or gallery names to experience the energy of the artwork. I’m reminded of my attempts to grasp the full significance of Old Cairo: sometimes it’s okay to abandon the effort, and simply dwell in a space for as long as one can.

In the case of the Museum of Modern Egyptian Art, we had less time to dwell than we expected. The website told us the museum closed at 8:00 p.m.; Google said 4:00 p.m.; and the guards sent us away at 3:30 p.m. (This kind of inconsistency is becoming familiar to us.) For most of the ninety minutes we were there, we were the only visitors in the galleries. Afterwards, we wandered through the grounds of the Opera House and made our way to Zooba for a dinner of ful and falafel. (This popular Egyptian street-food chain just opened up a location in New York City.) The highlight of our dinner came when I received a call from a delivery driver on my Cairo cell phone number. After struggling through a halting Arabic conversation, I triumphantly reported to C., “I told him that I wasn’t home!” C. complimented me on my language skills. It wasn’t until the next day that I realized what I’d actually told the driver was: “I am not a house.”

(I suppose this statement was equally true.)

But perhaps the place that most captures the strange, complex, and ethereal feel of Zamalek is the Aquarium Grotto Garden, which we stumbled upon by accident during a visit to the Cairo Flea Market.

The garden was first established by Khedive Ismail (also known as Isma’il Pasha, or Ismail the Magnificent) in 1867. This was merely one of several parks that Khedive Ismail commissioned during his reign as Ottoman Viceroy of Egypt, since the expansion of green spaces was part of his effort to remake Cairo in the style of European cities. In 1902, the garden was opened to the public. Soon after, aquarium tanks were installed in the walls of the grotto and they were filled with water and fish.

After working our way through a labyrinth of arches and light-filled stairways, we found ourselves in a much darker, dimmer network of manmade caves.

I don’t know what exactly we expected—but it wasn’t what we found. Although the tanks were still embedded in the walls, now they housed taxidermied crocodiles and turtles, dried sea anemones, and jars of exotic pickled fish. This was not an aquarium so much as the tomb of an aquarium, haunted by the desiccated bodies of the creatures who had once bubbled through the blue-green water and swished their tails against the glass.

At the center of the aquarium, the tunnels opened up into a vaulted cave. Sunlight beamed through the ceiling, and we could hear bats chuckling and swooping among the manmade stalactites. After a few minutes, C. said: “This is a little creepy. I think maybe we should go?” I said: “Just one more photo.”

It’s hard to find much information on the aquarium, other than the brief snippets of history above and an article from 2017 announcing plans to refurbish the place. Atlas Obscura suggests that the space fell into disrepair because of “economic reasons.”

When we described our visit in the daily journal our Arabic tutor has assigned us, she told us that the gardens “used to be beautiful.”

“Why not now?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Corruption.”

Then she spelled the word for us in Arabic, and we copied it into our notebooks next to “spring,” “Tuesday,” and “There is no snow in Egypt.”

Before we came, when I thought of Egypt’s history, I focused on all the ways I imagined it was haunted by its ancient past. But now, having whiled away these strange hours in Zamalek, I am beginning to recognize the outlines of more modern ghosts: the colonialist agendas, the architectural visions, the revolutionary zeal. They’re all right there, layered beneath my own reflection as I consider the stuffed seal and geese behind their scratched and foggy glass.

Yours—L.

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