Egyptian Chronicles: The Not So Green Attaba From 100 Years Ago

El-Attaba is a very famous and very old area in Cairo despite some may think that it is as old as old Cairo.El-Attaba or rather the square of El-Attaba is among the Khedival heritage we proudly remember as the hopeless attempt of Khedive Ismail to make from Cairo as Paris of the Orient trying to copy down town Paris especially that in the middle of the square you could find the old Khedival Opera house with the Statue of Ibrahim Pasha. But the history of this region in fact is much older than the Khedival era and the 19th century , it goes back when the Green Attaba was actually Blue Attaba.

The Blue Attaba :

During the Othman era , one of the famous merchants in Cairo built a huge magnificent palace in Attaba which became known as the Palace of Attaba, that palace was owned by Mamluk princes afterwards till it reached to the family of Mohamed Ali. El-Attaba in Arabic means the doorstep and the first owner of that palace colored the doorstep in a blue color. Of course I must hint out that the Mamluk princes were said to add more decorations to the palace. When Abbas I owned it ,he decided to demolish and re-build it again , that time its doorstep’s color was green as he hated blue !!

Now you may ask what happened to El-Attaba palace well Khedive Ismail decided to include part of it in the Opera hour and the square and thus he demolished it where as the other part included in the mixed courts complex in that area before its transfer to the high supreme court.

The Palace was gone but the green color remained and associated with the square and the area more than the Palace .In the first half of the 20th century El-Attaba was considered the heart of Cairo , it was like the Tahrir square there , all the big departments stores there, Egypt Post was there , fire station and banks. By time the El-Attaba’s green color began to fade over and over especially after the great fire of the Khedival opera. Now the area which was among the foreign economic centers of Cairo became among the local popular trade centers of Cairo. El-Attaba now became a popular market for the working class. You can’t walk in its streets now because of the wandering sellers and their merchandise. You can find everything in Attaba from Clothes to home appliances to old books to Egyptian baby showers supplies. What is unique in Attaba is that in such street in it you can find , a whole market , a whole industry ,a whole history of its own.

Now here was the green Attaba from many decades ago

and here it is now

In 1959 the Egyptian Cinema produced a comedy called “ El-Attaba El-Khadra” {The green Attaba} where the square of El-Attaba is sold to naive Upper Egyptian Ismail Yassin by professional crock Ahmed Mazher whom spotted the rich Yassin in Misr railway station and manage to deceive him with the help of beautiful Sabah. “Sabah sang couple of wonderful songs in this film”

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