Wekalet El Ghouri

Sultan al-Ghuri built the wekala in 1504 to 1505 as a working caravanserai: storerooms and stables around a courtyard on the ground floor, merchants' lodgings in the galleries above, the standard arrangement for handling long-distance trade in a walled city. It is the best preserved building of its kind left in Cairo, with five storeys of arcaded galleries around a deep stone court and mashrabiya screens on the upper levels. It now works as an arts centre with craft workshops in the old storerooms, and the courtyard is used several evenings a week for a tanoura performance, the whirling dance derived from Sufi practice, with musicians on a low platform and the dancers' skirts lit from below. The show is free or very cheap and fills quickly.

History

Sultan al-Ashraf Qansuh al-Ghuri built the wikala, an urban caravanserai housing merchants and their goods, in 1504-1505 as part of a large project that also included his mausoleum and a religious complex with a khanqah, a sabil-kuttab and a mosque-madrasa just to the west, which the wikala's revenues helped to fund; above the wikala was a rab', a low-income apartment block for permanent residents, and all of it was set up as a charitable endowment, a waqf. It was last restored in 2004 and now houses artisans' workshops and studios, offices and cultural shows such as Sufi whirling (Wikipedia, Wikala of al-Ghuri).

Highlights

• The five-storey courtyard - arcaded merchant galleries around a stone court.
• Mashrabiya screens - carved wooden lattices on the upper lodgings.
• Tanoura performance - whirling dance in the courtyard several evenings a week.
• Craft workshops - the old storerooms in use again.

When to go

October to April. Performance evenings are the reason to time a visit, usually two or three nights a week; arrive well before the start because seating is limited and unreserved. By day the courtyard is quiet and often empty. Two hours.

Before you go

The performance schedule changes and is poorly published, so confirm locally on the day. Seating is hard benches with no allocation and the courtyard fills half an hour ahead. The building is a venue rather than an interpreted monument, with almost no signage about its history.

Nearby

Khan el-Khalili and al-Azhar are a few minutes away; al-Muizz street runs north.