The Great Gallery Art Tour

Breakfast at your hotel before pickup and off to our first venue for the day.

The Museum of Islamic Art in Cairo is acknowledged as the largest museum in the world specialising in Islamic Art.  Currently, it houses over 100,000 artifacts covering all the different forms of Islamic Art from various periods of Islamic history.

Its collection is comprehensive in quantity and quality.  This has made it a beacon of Islamic art and civilization throughout its history. It has also become the ‘go to’ organisation and library for researchers and historians.  The museum attracts visitors from all walks of life, who are interested in the intricacies of Islamic sciences and disciplines such as medicine, engineering, and astronomy.

Its collection includes metallic, glass, and porcelain utensils, as well as jewelry, weapons, wood and ivory objects, textiles, and carpets. The museum ​also has a large library with a rich collection of specialized books and references covering a wide variety of topics like Islamic history, antiquities, art, and architecture.

Adam Henein was renowned as a sculptor since the 1950s and rose to fame for the inspiration his art drew from ancient Egypt. He was awarded the Luxor Studio Scholarship for Distinguished Artists in the West Bank and Qurna in 1954 and 1955 and led the restoration of the Great Sphinx of Giza from 1989 to 1998.

After living in Paris, he returned to Egypt and started the International Sculpture Symposium in Aswan. He received many awards, including Egypt’s State Medal and the Mubarak Award. Henein’s art has been shown worldwide, from Alexandria to Rome, and displayed in world-class platforms like New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The main museum building consists of 3 floors, spread across the space of 700 meters, displaying an array of Adam’s work, featuring sculptures, drawings, paintings, prints, and even textiles. In addition to the main building, the museum’s garden is where Adam’s pieces blend in with nature. This open space is where the museum’s public audience get to sit down on the fresh grass and have a cup of coffee while having the chance to admire more of Adam’s artworks.

Since Adam himself oversaw and supervised the process of establishing and equipping the museum, you walk around the space knowing that the artist himself chose every tiny detail around the museum.

We would like to acknowledge the works of Adam Henein’s publicly available on You Tube.

We enjoy taking our guests out for lunch because it’s another way to experience Egyptian culture. We just want to make the following points. The restaurant that is part of this experience is the revolving restaurant atop the Hilton Hotel. This is one of the top restaurants in Cairo and a chance to not only take in the stunning view of Cairo, but as a great interlude to a captivating day.

Near the pyramids at Giza, the centre was founded in the early 1950s by the late architect Ramses Wissa Wassef as a weaving school. It has since evolved to include workshops and showrooms, a pottery and sculpture museum,  houses and farm buildings, and is constructed entirely of mud brick.

For Wissa Wassef, vaulted and domed mud brick structures represented something quintessentially Egyptian as these forms had been adopted by Paranoiac, Coptic, and Islamic civilisations. The choice of this traditional technology also reflected his desire to transmit the values of handicrafts to succeeding generations in a rapidly industrialising country.

The Ramses Wissa Wassef Art Center was the home of a unique experiment in tapestry weaving that has produced extraordinary works admired and collected by museums and galleries around the world.  His ceramic creations were also a passion throughout his life. 

Overnight – the second of 3 nights at the Cairo Marriott (Nile River) 5 Star Hotel. B L included – Dinner at Own Expense.

Breakfast at your hotel before pick up and off to our first venue for the day.

The Gayer-Anderson Museum is an art museum is situated adjacent to the Mosque of Ahmad ibn Tulun. The museum is noted for being one of the few examples of 17th-century domestic architecture in Cairo, and for its collection of furniture, carpets, curio, and other objects. The building takes its name from Major Robert Grenville Gayer-Anderson Pasha, who resided in the house between 1935 and 1942 with special permission from the Egyptian Government.

It’s Sure to Leave You Spell Bound

The museum consists of two houses built using the outer wall of the Mosque of Ibn Tulun as support. The larger house, located to the east was built in 1632 AD (1041 AH). It later came into the possession of a wealthy Muslim woman

from Crete, and the home became popularly known as “House of the Cretan Woman.” The second house, to the west later became known as “Beit Amna bint Salim”. The two houses were joined by a bridge at the third floor level.

The images of Essam.E.A.Mohamed, Berthold Werner and Djehouty and are reproduced here under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License and the images have not been altered.

In 1935, Major Gayer-Anderson, a retired collector, was granted permission to reside in the house, which had just been restored. Gayer-Anderson oversaw the installation of electricity and plumbing, and the restoration of fountains, pavements, and other parts of the interior of the home. He populated the building with his personal collection of art, furnishings, and carpets, and he built a sailing boat he used to collect these antiques from all over Egypt.

The Legends of the House

There are two main legends associated with the house. These are: The house was built on the remnants of an ancient mountain. It is believed that this is where Noah’s Ark came to rest after the deluge described in both the Bible and Qur’an.  The second is that Moses was spoken to by God on this spot.

The images of Essam.E.A.Mohamed, Berthold Werner and Djehouty and are reproduced here under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License and the images have not been altered.

 Khan El Khalili Bazaar 

Khan El Khalili is the oldest bazaar in Egypt and has been operating 24 hours a day for 600 years.

It is at the bazaar that we will take coffee/tea at on of the most renowned coffee house, El Fishawy coffee whose walls are adorned by incredible art and which became the hub for famous poets, writers and famous people like Napoleon Bonaparte.  And then lunch at  MaGuib Mahfouz Restaurant named as a tribute to Egypt’s first Poet Laureate

After lunch it’s your free time to explore the bazaar and shop till you drop!

We return to the hotel before a pick up at 7pm for your  evening dinner cruise on the Nile.  There is traditional dancing and entertainment.

Overnight – the third of 3 nights at the Cairo Marriott (Nile River) 5 Star Hotel. B L included – Dinner at Own Expense.

Breakfast: Enjoy breakfast prior to your departure.

Checkout times can be arranged with the hotel and depending on your departure time you have the options of additional tours. Please consult One Horizon for your options which may include:

1. The Giza Pyramids excursion
2. The National Museum of Egyptian Civilisation or
3. The Grand Egyptian Museum

Transfers  You will transfer to Cairo International Airport for your ongoing journey at a prearranged time and also facilitate your movement through Immigration