Coptic Cairo

Coptic Cairo is a small, walled quarter in Old Cairo, built inside and around the remains of a Roman fortress called Babylon. Within a few hundred metres you can walk between an ancient church, a synagogue, a mosque and a Roman tower.

It is the oldest continuously inhabited part of the city, and it predates the Islamic conquest by centuries.

Egypt is usually visited for its pharaonic past, and this quarter fills in the fifteen hundred years afterwards. The Coptic Church is one of the oldest Christian communities in the world, and this is its historic centre.

The buildings are unusual. The Hanging Church is suspended over the gatehouse of the Roman fortress — hence the name — with a section of glass floor inside so you can see the drop beneath. Ben Ezra Synagogue, a short walk away, is where the Cairo Geniza was found: a storeroom of discarded documents that turned out to be one of the richest sources for medieval Mediterranean daily life anywhere.

It is also compact, shaded and walkable, which makes it a good contrast to a morning on an open desert plateau.

The Romans built the fortress of Babylon here to control the point where the Nile met a canal to the Red Sea. Two of its towers still stand, and much of the quarter is built directly on and into its walls.

Christianity in Egypt is traditionally traced to the first century, and the community that became the Coptic Orthodox Church was well established long before the Arab conquest in the seventh century. Several churches in the quarter claim foundations from the fourth to seventh centuries, rebuilt many times since.

The Church of St Sergius and Bacchus is traditionally held to stand over a crypt where the Holy Family sheltered during the flight into Egypt. Whether or not you take the tradition literally, it has shaped the quarter's importance to pilgrims for well over a thousand years.

The Geniza deserves its own sentence. Because Jewish practice forbade destroying papers that might carry the divine name, the community at Ben Ezra dropped nearly a thousand years of letters, contracts, shopping lists and marriage deeds into a storeroom. Recovered in the 1890s, those documents rewrote the history of the medieval Mediterranean from the middle of society outward — trade, prices, family life — rather than from the palaces down.

The layering here is physical. The Hanging Church sits on the Roman gatehouse, the Coptic Museum stands inside the fortress circuit, and the Mosque of Amr — the first mosque in Egypt — was founded a short walk away when the conquering army camped at Fustat. Egypt's great transitions of faith all happened within sight of this one small quarter.

• The Hanging Church, built over the Roman gatehouse, with its glass floor panel
• Ben Ezra Synagogue, where the Cairo Geniza documents were found
• The Church of St Sergius and Bacchus and its crypt
• The Coptic Museum — the best collection of Coptic art and textiles anywhere
• The surviving towers of the Roman fortress of Babylon
• The Mosque of Amr ibn al-As nearby, the first mosque built in Egypt