Porche Mamlouk
As Porche Mamlouk an entrance building is called, originally a residential building, the Kasr Rumy , in Cairo belonged. It was built in the second half of the 15th century during the Mamluk rule and is now located in the Louvre Museum , in the Islamic Art Department .
history
After the demolition of Kasr Rumy , the stones of the entrance building were packed in boxes in 1887 and shipped from Port Said to Le Havre on the Oxus passenger ship in 1889 . In Paris they were to be reassembled by the Union centrale des Arts décoratifs on the occasion of the world exhibition of 1889 and erected as an Arab building in the rue arabe (Arab street) specially created for the world exhibition . However, this project was never realized and the Porche Mamlouk was forgotten. It wasn't until the beginning of 2000 that the boxes, which contained five tons of stones, were rediscovered with a dozen plans and drawings. The documents were marked “Porte arabe” (Arabic gate) and the note “Don de M. de Saint-Maurice” (Foundation of M. de Saint-Maurice). On two drawings by the architect Jules Bourgoin, who made architectural drawings in Egypt from 1880 to 1884 on behalf of the then Ministère des Beaux Arts et de l'Instruction publique , “Kasr Rumy” is noted as a marginal note. At that time the building with its entrance building was still in its original place. It was probably demolished in the course of the redesign of Cairo at the end of the 19th century. In 2006, work began on reassembling the entrance building from the 300 remaining stones. Some stones were made of limestone in the matching colors.
architecture
The building, made of different colored limestone, rises above a square floor plan. It is spanned by a fan vault that first appeared in Cairo around the middle of the 14th century and was probably taken over from Anatolia, which was ruled by the Seljuks . The decor has geometric patterns alternating with floral motifs such as palmettes and clover leaves . The wall panels, the window openings and the three-pass arches above the passageways are framed by ribbons that are intertwined in several places.
literature
- Annie Christine Daskalakis-Mathews: Porche d'une demeure mamlouke au Caire. In: Sophie Makariou (ed.): Les Arts de l'Islam au Musée du Louvre. Editions Hazan et al., Paris 2012, ISBN 978-2-7541-0619-1 , pp. 261-264.
