L’église suspendue

A church built on top of a Roman fortress. Its name, the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities explains, comes from exactly that: it was raised over the ruins of the Roman fort of Old Cairo, so that it seems to hang above them. It stands beside the Coptic Museum in the quarter now called Old Cairo, where the walls of Rome, the churches of the Copts and the synagogue of Ben Ezra all sit within a few minutes' walk.

The question it answers is what happened to Egypt's old frontier-posts when the empire that built them became Christian.

Under Roman rule, one of the legions that held Egypt was stationed at the fortress of Babylon; fragments of the fortress can still be seen in the grounds of the Coptic Museum. The church was built over its ruins.

Much of what fills it is later. The Ministry dates its marble pulpit, carried on ten columns decorated with mosaic, to the eleventh century, and its icons mostly to the end of the eighteenth, the oldest to the fifteenth. Some Coptic practices still echo the ancient Egyptian calendar: the Coptic New Year falls on the first of Tut, in September, in a calendar based on the ancient Egyptian one, and before the High Dam the Feast of the Cross fell on the seventeenth of Tut, the day the Nile's final flood level was measured.

Inside, three rows of marble columns divide the church into four aisles under a wooden barrel roof that the Ministry compares to Noah's Ark. At the east end are the altars under wooden domes; along the walls, the icons. Look for the inscribed granite baptismal tank and the eleventh-century pulpit. Our suggestion is to walk round to the Coptic Museum afterwards and find the fragments of the Roman fortress in its grounds.