RAMSÈS PLACE

It's fun to look at a map of Cairo from the Guide Joanne of 1900, or a good old Baedeker of 1908, to find the correspondence between the Cairo of today and the city of a century ago. At that time, Ramses Square and Ramses Avenue, which runs from behind the Egyptian Museum to the Coptic Orthodox Cathedral, did not exist. Instead, there is a canal, the Ismaïleya Canal, which the Khedive had dug between 1864 and 1866 to provide fresh water for the digging of the Suez Canal. On the south side of the canal is a small square called Bab el-Hadid. The canal was finally filled in in 1921, while the adjacent districts of Fagalla and Abbasseyah had already been built.

The firstrailway station was inaugurated in 1856, just as the first rail link between Cairo and Alexandria was being completed, and a bridge linked the two banks of the canal. The present central station was built between 1891 and 1893, in neo-Arabic style and decorated with blue ceramics; it is close to the Railway Museum. In 1958, it served as the location for Youssef Chahine's film Central Station. The station was renovated again in 2011.

The terminus of the tramway to Heliopolis is on the same side of the avenue; the line was created in 1909 to link Cairo to the new city built by Baron Empain.

The el-Fath mosque was completed in 1990. It is close to late ^19th-century arcaded buildings flanking Rue Clot Bey, named after the famous physician to the Pasha of Egypt, and opened in 1872 to link the station to Avenue Mohammed Ali.

Ramses Square and Avenue lost the meaning of their name in July 2006, after the removal of the monumental statue of the Pharaoh, seriously threatened by pollution from the street and the 6-Octobre auto-bridge built in 1970, through which hundreds of thousands of cars pass every day. The statue of Ramses II was placed there in 1954; it is now in Giza, in the great Museum of Egyptian Art, part of which is due to open soon.

To theeast of Ramses Square, in the Fagalla district, are numerous churches and the headquarters of the Armenian and Greek Catholic patriarchates, as well as renowned French-speaking schools such as the Sainte-Famille run by the Jesuits and the Collège du Daher run by the Frères des Écoles chrétiennes.

Along Ramses Avenue and el-Galaa Street, which runs parallel to it towards the Nile, Egypt's major newspapers have taken up residence: El-Goumhorreya, El-Ahram, El-Akhbar.