On the immense scale of Heliopolis in north-west Cairo, El Shams Club is only a stone throne away from Estad El Koleya El Harbeya; or as the birds fly, only a few flapping of the wings.
The doorman at El Shams Club is the impersonation of the Greek mythological creature Cerberus and the emblematic omen of any doorman at any Egyptian ground or stadium whose instructions not to allow anyone in seems default. A standard procedure, perfected almost to fine art by the die-hards among overzealous gatekeepers.
The severe safety regulations are almost discouraging, turning grounds into almost unassailable fortresses. Only members are allowed access and any request to take photographs is met with sheer disbelief and instinctively denied. It feels like asking permission to enter a mosque star naked.
Eventually capturing Egyptian grounds on camera is a result of sheer persistence, determination and bluffing a way past a chain of security people, usually ending up in the stadium manager’s office after endless begging. It’s been close to a fata morgana to manage these pictorial series.
Metaphorically speaking, Egyptian grounds are like pyramids and mosques. If you’ve seen one, you have seen the majority, barring the odd fine exception.
Once inside a stadium one eyes the inevitable and dreaded athletics tracks, a semi-covered main stand running three quarters of the pitch and open stands sweeping round the corners only to meet uncovered seating opposite main stand. The main reason for the oval ground landscape in Egypt is that the vast majority of football clubs are actually omni sports clubs, with football being only one of the activities. The archetypal Estad El Shams in Cairo is no exception by all means.
History: Initial
History:
Initial settlements
The area around present-day Cairo, especially Memphis, had long been a focal nike shoes point of Ancient Egypt due to its strategic location just upstream from the Nile Delta. However, the origins of the modern city are generally traced back to a series of settlements in the first millennium AD. Around the turn of the 4th century, as Memphis was continuing to decline in importance, the Romans established a fortress town along the east bank of the Nile River. This fortress, known as Babylon, remains the oldest structure in the city. It is also situated at the nucleus of Egypt's Coptic Christian community, which separated from the Roman and Byzantine church in the late 4th century. Many of Cairo's oldest Coptic churches, including The Hanging Church, are located along the fortress walls in a section of the city known as Coptic Cairo.After the Muslim conquest of Egypt in 641, Rashidun commander 'Amr ibn al-'As established Fustat just north of Coptic Cairo and Babylon. At Caliph Umar's request, the Egyptian capital was moved from Alexandria to the new city. Fustat also became a regional center keen shoes of Islam and home to the Mosque of Amr ibn al-As, the first mosque in Egypt. When the Abbasids usurped the Umayyads in 750, they moved the capital to al-Askar, which they had built just north of Fustat. In 868, under the Tulunids, Egypt's capital was moved further north to their own settlement, al-Qatta'i. However, neither al-Askar nor al-Qatta'i achieved the prominence of Fustat; al-Askar had become indistinguishable from Fustat by the end of the 9th century, and al-Qatta'i was destroyed by the Abbasids when they recaptured Egypt in 905. With the Abbasid's second conquestpuma shoesFustat once again became the capital of Egypt.