and July 2, 2022 at 1:00 am EDT Houseboats along the shore of Giza days before their expected removal in Cairo, Egypt, on June 27, 2022. (Khaled Desouki/AFP/Getty Images/AFP/Getty Images) Placeholder while loading article actions CAIRO — When Ekhlas Helmy married and moved into her husband’s spacious new apartment in the Zamalek neighborhood of Cairo’s tony island in 1961, she felt as if she had moved into a prison. Born and raised in one of the elaborate houses that grace the banks of the Nile, she said nothing could compare to the river breezes and the lush garden she had left behind. Her husband agreed, and together they designed and built a houseboat of their own where she lived out the rest of her days, with an army of cats, a dog and several ducks. Until the government decided last week that Cairo’s few remaining houses were a nuisance and should be removed. “After I lived very happily, now I hate my life,” said the 87-year-old as she watched volunteers help remove her belongings from the once lavishly furnished two-story vessel with its blue walls, carved balconies and white. arrangement. The African continent’s largest city has always been in a state of flux with more historic buildings than in most countries, but now more than ever, its managers are seeking to change and modernize it — often at the expense of its older treasures. Trees are cut down, public spaces are rebuilt and old neighborhoods are bulldozed in a process inspired more by the glittering cities of the Persian Gulf than by the heritage of Cairo itself. Saving the sounds of an ancient city Houseboats, which once lined the city’s banks of the Nile, were an integral part of the country’s history, hosting belly dancers, artists, intellectuals, and even American diplomats and German spies, seeking a peaceful oasis amid the hustle and bustle. of Cairo. With a steady breeze coming down the river from the Mediterranean, the houseboats were cool even during the sweltering summer heat and tempered by road noise from the riverside green. The boats’ tenuous position between water and land, however, was also their downfall, as residents had to appease a number of government institutions: the Ministry of Irrigation for their position on the Nile, the Ministry of Agriculture for their mooring point on land . and a host of other agencies, including, ultimately, the almighty military. The growing pressure on the boats has come to the fore in recent weeks with the announcement that they will either be towed or scrapped from 27 July. Half of the 32 boats have been removed, with the rest expected to be removed by July 4. Ayman Anwar, head of the Nile Protection Authority, became the face of the government’s effort to clean up the river and bluntly said that despite repeated warnings, all boat owners had failed to renew their licenses and were behind on fees. “In 2016, we sent out a lot of notices through the Department of Irrigation and gave the owners a chance to sort things out by 2020,” he told ONTV on June 26. “Their status was a violation of the law. The state gave them many opportunities, but no one responded.” “It has been decided by the state, not the Ministry of Irrigation, that the Nile should not have residential houseboats,” he said, adding that it may be acceptable to turn them into commercial facilities. His bill is hotly contested by boat dwellers, who describe an escalating campaign against them that began in 2016 with increased fees and taxes by several government agencies, culminating in a refusal to accept money to renew licenses. Even when the boats are demolished and towed away, residents say not only will they not be compensated, but they are owed hundreds of thousands in unpaid fees. Award-winning Egyptian writer Ahdaf Soueif, 72, dreamed of retiring on the Nile and bought and renovated a boat in 2013. She described an escalating process as more government agencies began charging the houseboat to exist, with fees jumping by a year from $100 to $3,200. “We got caught up in this legal maze,” said Sweif, whose activist nephew, Alaa Abdel Fattah, has been in prison for much of the past decade. “Each of us has hired four lawyers.” At one point, she was told she owed $48,000 in back pay, but “that even if you paid it, you’d be moving.” “They’re going to cut it up and sell it for scrap metal,” she said tearfully, recalling how both of her children had their weddings on the boat and in his garden by the Nile. During the pandemic, her son and his family moved in with her. “These houses are very much part of the cultural identity,” he said. “Everyone, and I mean all Arabs, knows at least one iconic movie scene that took place on a houseboat.” There have been reports of houseboats since the 19th century, but they seem to have peaked in the popular imagination during World War II. The patriarch in Nobel Prize-winning author Naguib Mahfouz’s famous Cairo trilogy kept his dancing mistress on a houseboat. The US envoy to Egypt during World War II, Alexander Kirk, had a houseboat decorated with bowls of white ostrich feathers, where he threw parties for the diplomatic corps and wore lavender silk tuxedos. Nothing said Cairo like the ever-present water pipe – until Egypt banned them to fight Covid Most famously, two German spies were discovered living on a houseboat where they conspired with future Egyptian president Anwar Sadat (and a belly dancer) to pass information on British troop movements to General Erwin Rommel. Ahmed Zaazaa, an urban planner and researcher, said the removal or conversion of the houseboats into commercial properties is part of a wholesale renovation of the city, which has accelerated since 2017 and includes the construction of a massive new capital in the desert. Entire neighborhoods, including public housing projects, have been bulldozed to widen roads and build new ones. Some areas along the Nile have been extensively redeveloped to house luxury cafes and restaurants. “They’re commercializing all public spaces and bringing them back as public spaces, and of course these aren’t public spaces, they’re food courts,” Zaazaa said, noting that many of the designers have drawn inspiration from the very young, skyscraper. Equestrian City of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. “There’s a very clear approach from the government that doesn’t see any kind of value in heritage, any kind of value in the memory of the city.” With their role in Egypt’s novels, films and plays, he said, houseboats are so much a part of the city’s heritage that they are all drawn into a vision that has little time for history. For Helmy, on her blue boat, everything is a matter of history. While her husband died before the boat was finished, Helmy lived a happy life along the Nile that she could never have imagined amid the steaming concrete and cement that envelops so much of Cairo. “Someone living on a houseboat feels all the beautiful things around them, fresh air, animals and for a widow like me, you don’t feel alone, you feel like you have the whole world with you,” she said. Volunteers have agreed to take care of the dog, cats and ducks, but Helmy, who has no other home, doesn’t know what to do. “They’ll have to tow it while I’m in. We will either drown together or live together,” he said. Schemm reported from London.
