WATANI International
5 September 2010
Last month saw the opening of the house known as Beit al-Sitt Wassila—the house of Lady Wassila—in Fatimid Cairo as a poetry centre. The move came in response to a proposal by the poet Ahmed Abdel-Moeti Hegazi, who heads the poetry committee at the Supreme Council for Culture. Dr Hegazi’s idea was to use the house as an establishment to promote poetry by holding literary and poetry symposia, usually accompanied by music.
Magnificence restored
A few years ago it would have been hard to contemplate that this house might ever have metamorphosed in a centre for radiating culture. For 80 years no one even thought of restoring Lady Wassila’s House, since the problems involved were too great to contemplate. The entrance had almost fallen apart; the large court had collapsed; and the house had, over the centuries, lost two of its original four storeys. The building had caught fire more than once, and had been turned into a dumping ground.
The house was built in 1664 in Qutama Alley and was once one of Cairo’s most magnificent Mamluk residences. It is situated in the vicinity of the al-Azhar mosque in the neighbourhood of several such splendid Islamic houses including Beit al-Harrawi and Beit Zeinab Khatoun. Lady Wassila’s, like the other houses in Islamic Cairo, was triangular in area and was divided into two main wings. The first, which was for the reception of guests, stretched from the main door and included the courtyard, water tanks, a well and outer courtyards. The second wing was accessed through a narrow door and included the grain mill and upper courts. The house has four façades, of which three are close to the buildings surrounding the house. The main façade is 53 metres long.
More than 20 frescos of various locations; one is of Medina al-Munawwara, while another is the gate of a fortified town set in a green landscape, had been added a century after the house was built and reflect the artisan style that dominated the Ottoman Empire.
In July 2005 Sitt Wassila’s house was officially opened following a five-year restoration process. Among items found by the restorers was a love amulet inside a room on the first floor. This consisted of two papers and contained talismans and some texts from the Qur’an, together with the name of ‘Lutfi’, one of the owners of the house, as well as prayers to safeguard the mutual love between him and his wife Safiya.