WATANI International 22 March 2009
Nine portraits of members of the Mohamed Ali family have been stolen from the Fountain Palace in Shubra in north Cairo. The stolen portraits are of Mohamed Ali; Zeba Hanem Qaden; the young Khedive Ismail in military dress; Princess Fatma Ismail, Khedive Abbas Helmi, two paintings of the wives of Khedive Ismail. Princess Gashem Aft and Aziza Pasha Ezzat; and a painting of Mohamed Ali as a child. The investigations into the theft, which took place last week, are still ongoing. Since the paintings were removed from their frames and taken away in the middle of the night while all the doors were closed and intact, officials at the Culture Ministry believe the theft was undertaken by a museum insider. Public opinion is highly critical of the incident since the nature of the theft revealed the obvious deficiency in the museum security system.
Exclusive district
The Fountain Palace, the only remaining section of Mohamed Ali’s Shubra Palace, was restored after falling into disrepair and reopened in 2006 by President Hosni Mubarak. Before the opening ceremony, some paintings of Mohamed Ali and his family were brought from the Mohamed Ali Palace at the 12th-century Saladin Citadel east of Cairo where they had been in storage after the 1952 Revolution, restored by the Ministry of Culture and placed in the new museum.
Khedive Mohamed Ali Pasha, founder of the dynasty that bears his name, greatly admired the district of Shubra which was exclusive and salubrious in his day. Driving from Shubra al-Balad to Bab al-Hadid along a road ornamented with trees in 1808, he decided to build a palace there for himself and his family.
Mohamed Ali planned to make this his main residence, far from the Cairo hoi polloi and safe from the many traps engineered at that time by his enemies, the Mamluk leaders. The palace was built in a fashion unprecedented in Egypt. The huge site lent itself to the choice of a Turkish-style garden palace, but the labourers working on the construction were harshly treated and accordingly stopped working in protest. On hearing this, Mohamed Ali passed orders for the ringleaders to be buried alive.
Imported plants
The design was based on a large park surrounded by a great wall with a few gates. Several small buildings or kiosks were placed about the garden, each with its own specific architectural features. The magnificent park includes flowers imported from different parts of the world. There was also a hillock that housed a group of birds with a small kiosk in the middle floored with red marble and with a 10-metre high fountain.
In 1821 the Fountain Palace was added to the main palace. This palace was designed by Monsieur Drofti, the French envoy. The design was carried out by a French engineer, Pascal Coste, and was supervised by an Armenian engineer Youssef Hokaykat, a member of the Egyptian student mission that travelled to England for an education. The Fountain Palace was built to a rectangular shape, while in the centre was a pool with a small marble island ornamented with carved crocodiles.
One of the interesting facts about the Shubra Palace was that it was home to the first modern lighting system. It was installed at a cost of 2,000 Piastres and it was not until 1820 that a similar system was adopted in England.
Palace destroyed
By the end of the 1930s, at the beginning of the reign of Mohamed Ali’s descendant King Farouq, most of the palace buildings, gardens and park fell into disrepair when the king turned his attention to a new rest house at Anshas. The only building to survive was the Fountain Palace, which was later registered as a monument by the Committee for Protecting Arab Antiquities. However, the palace was totally neglected, and was soon surrounded by randomly built buildings.
The Fountain Palace, the restoration of which took three years and cost EGP50 million, is now in full bloom and is used to host prestigious cultural events.