Category Archives: Egyptomania

Egypt in vintage popular culture.

Hôtel du Sentier

Screen Shot 2021-08-22 at 16.39.11

I’ve posted before about the various Egypt-related street names and monuments scattered across Paris. If you get a kick out of discovering these sorts of things – and I do – then I have a hotel recommendation. The Hôtel du Sentier opened just this summer at the splendid address of 2 place du Caire. It’s housed in the block that also contains one of the entrances to the very fine Passage du Caire, which was built in 1798 to celebrate (a little prematurely) Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt. (Neighbouring streets are called rue du Caire, rue d’Aboukir, rue du Nil and rue d’Alexandrie.) The façade is decorated with ancient Egypt references, notably some heads of Hathor, to which street artists have recently added touches of their own – see photo below.

Passage-du-Caire-2

Screen Shot 2021-08-22 at 16.35.35

IMG_8497

Previously the area was shabby and rundown – the passage, which is the longest in Paris is still filled with a motley assortment of discount clothing stores, dry cleaners and wholesale mannequin outlets and is in bad repair – but the neighbourhood is definitely on the up. Sentier has become a hotspot for tech start-ups and is now hip. Just a couple of years ago the place du Caire was a forgotten space, now it’s buzzing, the pavement split between seating for a new Californian-inspired café and Le Champollion, the in-house café of the hotel.

Screen Shot 2021-08-22 at 16.36.11

As for the hotel, I haven’t actually been inside but I read that it has 30 rooms spread out over six floors. They overlook the glass roofs of the passage or place du Caire. From the photos it looks extremely chic. I didn’t dare click on the prices.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Egyptomania

The angels of Suez

IMG_8172

At the Musée des 30 années (Museum of the 1930s) on the outskirts of Paris I came across the above maquettes. The two sculptures are each about the size of a suitcase. I stopped to look at them because they’re beautifully streamlined examples of Art Deco styling. Then I glanced at the information on the plaque and was surprised to read they were working models for a proposed monument to the defence of the Suez Canal. What monument? What defence? So, of course, I went straight to Google and it transpires the monument was actually built, and there it stands, forty metres high, the height of a tower block, beside the Suez Canal near Ismailia. To my embarrassment, the author of guidebooks to Egypt for Lonely Planet and National Geographic, I’ve never seen it. Never even knew of its existence.

ismailia_memorial

Flickr_-_casillero_-_Ismailia,_Unknown_Soldier_War_Memorial

It’s the work of Raymond Delamarre (1890–1986), a French sculptor, known particularly for his war memorials, and the French architect Michel Roux-Spitz. Together they won a competition organised in 1925 by the Suez Canal Company to produce a monument celebrating the force of British, Egyptian, French and Italian troops who in 1915 repulsed an attack on the Canal by the Ottoman Turkish army. The monument takes the form of two huge winged angels in rose granite placed at the base of two pylons. The angels carry flaming torches and stand, in Delamarre’s words as ‘guardians of the country’s destiny’. The monument is designed be seen by ships passing through the Canal. Its inauguration took place on 3 February 1930. A special medal was struck to celebrate the event, designed by Delamarre himself.

74053_ca_object_representations_media_53255_large

That makes a second reason to head back out to Ismailia next time I’m in Egypt (the first being George’s restaurant, of course).

You can find out much more about the project here (in French but with some great images). Click here for a post on that other piece of impressive French sculpture originally also intended for the Suez Canal.

2 Comments

Filed under Art and artists, Egyptomania

Midnight in Cairo

Midnight210518090651037~

By chance or design, I don’t know, the Divas show (see previous post) coincides with the recent publication of Midnight in Cairo: The Female Stars of Egypt’s Roaring ’20s, a book by Raphael Cormack, an academic specialising in Egyptian theatre. It was released in the US in March this year (cover above), and in the UK and Egypt (cover below) a month or two later. I have to immediately own up to not having read the book. I bought it but my wife got to it first and she’s slowly making her way through it. Slowly, because every paragraph sends her to YouTube to stream some vintage Egyptian film or archive interview.

Cormack, currently a visiting researcher at Columbia University, was in Cairo in 2010, doing research for his doctorate degree on Egyptian theatre and found hundreds of sources in entertainment magazines from the early 20th century that revealed a time when ‘incredible stuff was going on in downtown theatres and cabarets and then cinema’. The book is structured around the lives of seven of the most prominent women in Egypt’s entertainment industry.

‘The stories of women’s lives in particular leapt off the page. Historians are often told that women’s perspectives are hard to find, but here they could not be ignored,’ he told jadaliyya.com. ‘I have tried to use their words and experiences to build a picture of Cairo’s nightlife and entertainment industry from the perspective of these fascinating women.’

91ZXLMSL1xL

The jadaliyya interview also includes an extract from the book’s introduction, which – I hope the publishers don’t mind – I abridge further here because it is a wonderfully evocative piece of writing and bound to appeal to anybody who appreciates the content on this blog and in my own books.

Introduction
In the late 1980s, the Egyptian writer Louis Awad looked back on his student days in Cairo between the wars. In particular, he remembered the nights he spent in the cafés of Cairo’s nightlife district, Ezbekiyya.

All you had to do was sit in one of the bars or cafés that looked out onto Alfi Bey Street, like the Parisiana or the Taverna, and tens of different salesmen would come up to you, one selling lottery tickets, another selling newspapers, another selling eggs and simit bread, another selling combs and shaving cream, the next shining shoes, and the next offering pistachios. There were also people who would play a game ‘Odds or Evens’, performing monkeys, clowns, men with pianolas who performed with their wives, fire eaters, and people impersonating Charlie Chaplin’s walk. Among all these, there was always someone trying to convince you that he would bring you to the most beautiful girl in the world, who was only a few steps away.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the centre of nightlife in Ezbekiyya was Emad al-Din Street – long and wide, with a tram line down the middle running north to the suburbs of Shubra and Abbasiyya. The intersection with Alfi Bey Street, where Louis Awad used to sit in the bars and cafés, was at the southern end of the action. In its heyday, Cairo’s nightlife could rival that in Paris, London or Berlin. Any resident of Egypt’s capital city in the early twentieth century could have claimed, with justification, to be living in one of the great cities of the world, at the centre of many different cultures.

Excerpted from Midnight in Cairo: The Divas of Egypt’s Roaring ‘20s. Copyright (c) 2021 by Raphael Cormack, published by Saqi Books in the UK, W. W. Norton & Company in the US and AUC Press in Egypt.

2 Comments

Filed under Egyptomania, Lost Egypt

The Grammar of Ornament

132796

Speaking of London’s Great Exhibition of 1851, which I was a few posts ago in relation to St Mark’s church in Alexandria, another of the architects involved in that fantastic project had a strong connection with Egypt and that was Owen Jones.

Educated at England’s Royal Academy, Jones travelled in Egypt (where he joined the party of painter Robert Hay), Greece, Turkey and Spain from 1833 to 1834 making copious notes and sketches along the way. These became the basis for a lifetime’s work as a highly influential writer, architect-decorator and illustrator. He was commissioned to work on the interior arrangements at the Great Exhibition. When the venue for the exhibition, the Crystal Palace, was disassembled moved and reassembled in south London, Owen was tasked with creating a series of decorative courts themed on Egypt (pictured above), Greece, Rome and the Alhambra. He was assisted in this by Egyptologist Joseph Bonomi.

In 1856, Jones published the work for which he is best known, the mesmerising Grammar of Ornament. In this he presents in a series of painted plates key examples of design through the ages from around the world, but particularly the Middle East. It is a sumptuously beautiful thing, available in modern facsimile, which is large, heavy and expensive, but happily also online in the archives of the University of Heidelberg. Go take a look for yourself.

jones1856_0038

jones1856_0041

jones1856_0042

jones1856_0043

jones1856_0044

jones1856_0045

jones1856_0046

jones1856_0052

jones1856_0094

jones1856_0101

jones1856_0111

jones1856_0112

Leave a Comment

Filed under Art and artists, Egyptologists and Egyptology, Egyptomania

Ingrid and the sphinx

DhvkcdMWsAEwOVv

Following on from previous posts of glamorous women hanging out with the sphinxes on London’s Embankment (here and here), here’s a fabulous publicity shot of Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, taken to promote the movie Indiscreet (1958). Courtesy of @JohnJJohnson

1 Comment

Filed under Egyptomania

Egypt in Paris in 1900

Screen Shot 2018-06-23 at 16.51.46

Two posts back I wrote on searching for Egypt in Paris this summer. The picture above is what I would have found had I done the same 118 years ago.

In 1900 Paris hosted the Exposition Universelle, a world’s fair, and its fifth such jamboree since 1855. It was intended to celebrate the coming of a new century. It introduced the world to art nouveau, and gifted the city the Grand Palais and Petit Palais, which stand beside the Seine until today. (The Eiffel Tower was the legacy of the previous 1889 Exposition). Among its other popular features were the foreign pavilions, each intended to celebrate their home nations. The Egyptian Palace was designed by French architect Marcel-Lazare Dourgnon, who, just a few years later, would win the commission for Cairo’s Egyptian Museum. It was a curious complex with a domed Mamluk madrassa in the centre flanked by two pharaonic temple facades. It was, apparently, very popular with visitors. Behind one of the pharaonic facades was a theatre with a show that featured a supposed 200 dancers. The theatre or cinema with an ancient Egyptian façade became something of a craze in the 1920s and ’30s, and I wonder if this is the protoype?

Screen Shot 2018-06-23 at 16.51.30

 

Screen Shot 2018-06-23 at 16.51.15

The Grand Palais, incidentally, also references Egypt in the gorgeous mosaic friezes that run under its colonnades.

Image2

Image3

1 Comment

Filed under Egyptomania

Nena and the sphinx

nena-and-the-sphinx-1963

What is it with sphinxes and beautiful women? Some while back I posted a photo of Sophia Loren sat in front of one of the sphinxes on London’s Embankment (here) and yesterday I find the picture above. It’s the very same sphinx but this time the lady is Nena von Schlebrügge, an American fashion model in the 1950s and 1960s, and mother of actress Uma Thurman. The shot was taken by celebrated English fashion and portrait photographer Norman Parkinson in 1963.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Egyptomania

Egypt in Paris

001_suez_poster

Over the years I’ve been to a number of good exhibitions at the Institut du monde arabe in Paris and last week I went to another. Next November marks 150 years since the opening of the Suez Canal and the Institute has decided to get the celebrations started early with a show called ‘The Epic of the Suez Canal’. It begins with a room dedicated to the grand inauguration party at Port Said. The centrepiece is a large model of the town and canal with the pavilions erected for the occasion; there are further models, notably of Aigle, the ship on which guest of honour, the Empress Eugenie, sailed in the procession through the canal, lots of paintings and one of the dresses worn by Eugenie.

002_suez

003_suez

003b_suez

The exhibition continues by detailing the canals dug in ancient times, illustrated by pharaonic loans from the Louvre, and then documents the various other schemes predating the Suez Canal, before going on to document its construction. Included are maquettes and a watercolour of the monument designed by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi that was to have stood at the mouth of the canal, but which in a slightly amended form was eventually erected in New York Harbour (I’ve blogged about this before, here).

004_suez

006_suez

It takes the story through into the 20th century with Nasser’s nationalisation of the canal, the tripartite aggression by the Israel, Britain and France, and the 1967 and ’73 wars. It ends by putting you on the bridge of a container ship sailing the length of the canal. It runs until 5 August and is well worth seeing.

008_suez

Also on this summer is an exhibition at the Quai Branly, near the Eiffel Tower, called ‘Paintings from Afar’ (Peintures des lointains). It brings together around 200 unseen works from the museum’s collection, largely drawn from the late 18th to mid 20th centuries, illustrating the Western perception of distant lands. Among the pieces on display are more depictions of the Suez Canal, as well as several paintings by Emile Bernard, including ‘Les marchands du Caire’, below. It runs until January 2019.

011_suez

If you are in Paris this summer, you could spend a whole week exploring the links between the French capital and Egypt. There are the obvious ones, like the ancient Egyptian treasures in the Louvre and the obelisk on place de la Concorde, but there is plenty more beyond. You might start by searching out the passage du Caire, a covered arcade that runs off rue St Denis, which is filled by textile and garment shops. It exits onto place du Caire where, if you look back, you see a frieze of pharaonic faces decorating the facade.

012_suez

013_suez

Just around the corner are the rues Alexandrie, Abu Qir and du Nil. Opposite the west end of rue du Nil is the Libraire Petit Egypte, a fine little bookshop with a good section of all kinds of books on Egypt. From here it’s not too far to walk to place du Chatelet, where you find the Fontaine du palmier with four huge sphinxes at its base (below). You might then hope on Metro line 4 a few stops to Saint Suplice from where it’s a few minutes walk to rue de Sevres where you find the Fontaine du fellah (below), also known as the Egyptian Fountain, which was erected in 1806 commemorating Napoleon’s short-lived expedition in Egypt.

015_suez

016_suez

Some of those who accompanied Napoleon on that particular campaign are now buried in Pere Lachaise cemetery, where there is no shortage of Egyptian-inspired funerary architecture (below). Personally, I prefer the Montmarte Cemetery where you find a sleek, life-sized figurine of Egyptian diva Dalida (below), which is more fashion mannequin than funerary monument. A short walk away there is also place Dalida, with a well-fondled bust of the singer.

017_suez

018_suez

019_suez

Finally, you shouldn’t miss the Cinema Louxor, which I have blogged about previously, here. As well as being a fabulous building, it also frequently shows Egyptian films. We’ve seen Chahine’s 1957 comedy Inta Habibi here (the main auditorium here is named for Chahine) and Le Caire confidential, and just the week before we arrived in Paris last month it was showing Sala Abou Seif’s 1956 film Shabab Imra’ah.

014_suez

That should keep you busy for a while.

3 Comments

Filed under Egyptomania

The Egyptian opera

8a0bc79b-e83f-433c-a1d2-fd66d676da25

Verdi’s opera Aida is being performed at the Pyramids next week, on Friday 9 March. There were originally to have been three performances on successive nights but, apparently, ticket sales were so poor that it has been cut back to just the one. It seems like Aida is always being performed at the Pyramids but actually this year’s production is the first at Giza since 2010. Before that, there were performances at the Pyramids in 1987, 1998, 1999 and 2000 (as well as at Luxor Temple in 1987, the Temple of Hatshepsut in 1994 and Deir al-Bahri in 1997). More shows at the Pyramids were planned but after the downturn in tourism following 911 and the subsequent war in Iraq, the annual stagings of the opera were moved to the less financially risky setting of the new Cairo Opera House.

2015HM8591_jpg_l
The greatest cultural event of the 20th century!

The idea of putting on Aida every year dates back to the days of the old Opera House on Midan Opera, where Verdi’s grandest opera was staged every year until the building burned down in October 1971. This was the venue, of course, for Aida’s premiere, which took place exactly a century earlier in 1871. The popular belief that Aida was composed for the opening of the old Opera House and/or the opening of the Suez Canal is false. Cairo’s original Opera House opened on 1 November 1869 with Rigoletto and the Suez Canal opened 15 days later, both before Verdi had ever been agreed to compose an Egyptian opera. The opera that became Aida was commissioned by Khedive Ismail of Egypt but the commission was not accepted until some time in 1870. Verdi actually declined twice until a reading of the proposed scenario – attributed to Egyptologist Auguste Mariette – changed his mind. That and the Khedive threatening to go to Charles Gounod or Richard Wagner instead.

2014-635503190851559507-155

Opera_Square
The Opera House (left) seen from the roof of the Grand Continental

Mariette, who opened the first antiquities museum in Cairo, in 1863, and who was the country’s chief Inspector of Monuments, remained intimately involved with the opera. It was he, for example, who signed the contract with Verdi on behalf of Ismail. (The composer was paid 150,000 French francs and retained rights to the opera in all countries except Egypt.) And it was Mariette who supervised the designs for the opera’s scenery and costumes.

Aida was originally scheduled to premiere in January 1871 but it was delayed by the Prussian siege of Paris, which trapped Mariette in the city with all his designs. It wasn’t until 24 December that the curtain finally went up, eleven months later than planned. The opera, with its cast of 300, was a huge success but Verdi did not attend. He was, apparently, angered by the negative publicity that surrounded the Egyptian premiere and so instead he reserved his attendance for the first performance of Aida at La Scala in Milan (the model for the Cairo Opera House), the following February, which he considered the real premiere.

Screen Shot 2018-03-01 at 10.04.34

Screen Shot 2018-03-01 at 10.06.27
The above two images are Mariette’s original sketches for set designs

Anyway, in honour of next week’s performance, here’s a selection of Aida posters from performances around the world (with acknowledgement to CairoScene, who did this first).

c89eb87f3f17db80e1c009d83802b5aa

Print

5e9db305a72c6c5e0bbc446e38d9d3ba--aida-classical-music

b965547fa71c21ac2e6115dfdf0fade8--aida-opera

poster_715

AidaArtwork_WhiteEye_Vertical

0b3ac988cd4720308447c503dc90c0a2--graphic-posters-design-posters

Opera-Creative-Poster-2017-2

ffba72de3172e40484506d5e1c5ed4ad

543ac0b32b9a380d66d12e6b9a33b65f

908b0ac077220627e7602f202e380ef5--aida-opera

6162cee77606242b745557b45cbb603a--mariette-aida

6339304212460076

d42b158992c0182beef79d27de60767e--michel-centre-pompidou

aidaposter

863fb034-0324-4595-a411-0bbb6177d21b

Leave a Comment

Filed under Egyptomania, Lost Egypt

Egypt’s first lady of horror

EhlyEhrenM_Obelisk1st

I was doing an image search online recently for something or other when the cover above came up in the results. I had to have it. It turns out the book was published back in 1988 and is long out of print, but it was easy enough to find a copy on ebay. I did try reading it but I didn’t get very far because, well, sometimes you can judge a book by its cover. Much more interesting is the story behind its author.

EhrenMoreenEhly_authorphoto2

Ehren M Ehly was the pseudonym of Egyptian-American author Moreen Le Fleming Ehly. She was born in Heliopolis, Cairo in 1929, spent part of her youth in London, but then moved back to Heliopolis, where she attended St Clare’s College (it still exists). In her late teens she competed in track and field for various sporting clubs. According to her obituary, she was also ‘a noted beauty’ (that’s her, above) and won the Miss Egypt title in 1949 in the presence of King Farouk at the Auberge des Pyramides nightclub. Coincidentally, in the 10 April 1950 edition of Life magazine, in an article titled ‘The Problem King of Egypt’, there is mention of this very contest, in which it says, ‘No sooner had the judges announced their decision than a message was sent over from the king’s table indicating that His Majesty was displeased with the verdict. The judges hastily reversed themselves and awarded the cup to another girl.’ The obituary doesn’t mention whether Ms Ehly was the favoured or disfavoured girl.

zm_angelo
Bathing beauties at the Auberge des Pyramides, some time in the 1950s

She met her future husband Robert, a US marine stationed as an embassy guard, at a sporting club in Cairo (the US embassy in Cairo and its marine guards feature in the early pages of Obelisk), however, they were separated when Ehly and her mother fled Egypt during the Black Saturday riots in 1952. They were later reunited in London, where Ehly was working at the venerable Flemings Hotel on Half Moon Street. They married in London in December 1952 but, according to the obituary, encountered bureaucratic problems getting Ehly into the United States. The story goes that the way was smoothed with the help of Ralph Edwards, host of TV gameshow Truth or Consequences, who invited Robert onto the programme to judge a beauty contest and had Ehly surprise him by popping out of an oversized milk carton.

The couple settled in the US and lived for a brief time in Louisiana before settling in California. Ehly worked for many years at Sears & Roebuck, before she quit to take up writing classes. She intended writing romance but somehow wound up turning out horror, possibly influenced by some of the books she had read in her father’s library, notably H Rider Haggard’s She. Obelisk was her first novel, followed shortly by Totem.

EhlyEhrenM_Obelisk1st

EhlyEhrenM_ObeliskStepback

EhlyEhrenM_Totem1st

EhlyEhrenM_TotemStepback

She wrote four pulp horror novels in total in the space of around four years before coming to a sudden stop. I can’t help but wish she had written her memoirs instead. She died on 26 December 2012, survived by three children, seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

2 Comments

Filed under Egyptomania