Cairo's great market,
Khan al-Khalili, was the last stop before the caravans
headed out into the deserts of Sinai. It was the most
important place to stock up on the food, water, and trade
goods that travelers would need for journeys to Jerusalem,
Baghdad, Persia, and as far as Afghanistan, India, and
China. When the caravans came home, they returned to the
market. Here, inside the walls of Egypt's largest city,
traders unloaded spices, silks, gems, and other valuables
gathered on their dusty treks.
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This small restaurant
and lunch counter officers falafel and other
specialties. |
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Khan al-Khalili
stood, literally, at the crossroads of the world. Goods
flowed north to Europe or south to Africa, west to Morocco
and Spain, or east to Arabia and India. Some believe that
the market became so influential--through its control over
the flow of spices from India to Europe--that it spurred
Spain to send explorers such as Christopher Columbus to
search for an alternative route to the Spice Islands and
India.
Today, some seven hundred years after it was founded,
Khan al-Khalili remains one of the world's major retail
markets. Cairo is widely accepted as the de facto capital of
the Arab world, and its historic market is a magnet for
Egyptians and visitors. Here discreetly veiled women,
standing next to tourists off cruise ships, shop for
slippers. A man in a tribal costume passes by, selling water
from a leather container carried on his back. Mothers and
fathers clutch children to their chests as they navigate the
market's tiny streets or the broader al-Muski Street, a
thoroughfare lined with shops selling everything from shawls
to washing machines.
The labyrinth of small shops, the smell of spices, the
call of hawkers, and the rising heat at the beginning of the
hot season could be scenes stolen from Hollywood stereotypes
of the Orient. This is a place to smell the spices of Asia
and Africa, to view hand-worked leather hassocks and
gemstones set in gold, to buy plastic toys and find blankets
that will warm dark-eyed Egyptian babies.
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