Draining Ground Water Saves Ancient Cairo Mosque, Church, Synagogue

OLD CAIRO - Creeping slowly down an ancient stone staircase beneath a church, an engineer used his flashlight to point out the marks on the walls above our heads where the water once stood, eating away the foundations of the massive building above us.

Since Roman times Old Cairo has consisted of a cluster of stone forts. Ancient builders also erected a church, mosque and even a synagogue. For 2,000 years Old Cairo stood, resisting the tides of history that swept over Egypt.

But in recent years, the ground water rose, in part because the Nile River had shifted 400 meters west of its old channel, bringing it closer to the monuments.

As a result, the ancient stone walls and passages were threatened, not by some invading army but by the invasion of ground water, seeping every higher as the nearby Nile rose and fell with the seasons.

This ancient heritage - which includes the oldest mosque in Africa - has now been saved from destruction by a U.S.-funded engineering project that has drained the waters and lowered the groundwater under these national and international treasures.

Now thousands of tourists come each day - high school students from Cairo, families from Alexandria and Minya, and tourists from Europe, Asia and America. They follow the guides telling of the Romans, who built a canal starting nearby that linked the Nile River to the Red Sea. They tell of the construction of the Amr Ebn El-As mosque, oldest in Africa, which still today hosts worshippers, standing and kneeling in a long line under the sturdy walls laid down by ancestors more than 1,000 years earlier.

"Around 1978 we started seeing ground water in the area of the monuments damaging the structures," said an engineer who has worked to save the antiquities. USAID then began to consider a project to drain the water away from the historic sites.

From 1978 to 1996, USAID spent $1 billion to complete a wastewater project for greater Cairo. In 2000, the work on historic Old Cairo began and it was completed in 2006.

"We replaced the old sewer system in front of the mosque with the aim of lowering the water around eight monuments," said the engineer.

"The challenge was to design a system that lowered the water but did not damage the monuments," he said, standing in front of St. Georges Church.

Micro-tunnels four to 24 inches in diameter were used. Fifty-foot deep holes were drilled and gravel laid inside. The water was carried about 1.5 kilometers away to a sewer system lower than that at Old Cairo. The work cost $15 million - mainly from USAID but also from the Egyptian government.

At the Ben Ezra Synagogue, a five-minute walk from St. Georges Church, visitors file in and listen to a guide tell them about its history. It was rebuilt in the 19th century on top of medieval ruins and once housed a massive library of documents about Jewish life in Cairo during the Middle Ages. The documents were in Hebrew words spelled out in Arabic script.

Although few Jews remain in Cairo to hold services at Ben Ezra, the nearby Amr Ebn El-Ass Mosque is used several times each day for worship.

After the melodic chant of the call to prayer echoes out across Old Cairo from the minarets, a few dozen men arrive, wash hands and feet, and then say their prayers. It's a scene little changed for more than 1,000 years. And thanks to the proper drainage far below the woven red carpets in the prayer space, the mosque, church, synagogue and Roman fort should all be around for another 1,000 years.