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Juergen Stryjak
Sednaoui
I have never found it recommended as a good
shopping address, not in guidebooks or in magazines: the Sednaoui
department store located near Al-Ataba Square in Cairo’s
Ezbekkiyya neighborhood. They might be right, since Sednaoui doesn’t
offer the latest fashion nor souvenirs or jewelry or other things
a tourist would like to buy. Sednaoui is a state-owned department
store for middle and lower middle class Egyptians with dusty
commodities in a neglected atmosphere. If you have ever entered a
state-owned storehouse in communist Eastern Europe in the early
Seventies, the displays at Cairo’s Sednaoui department store
look exactly like this.
But there’s something else which makes a visit
to the Sednaoui branch in Ezbekiyya a very special and exciting
shopping experience. It is the interior design, the furniture, the
architecture, the whole atmosphere that gives the shopper a
feeling of having entered a hidden secret place, which has just
woken up after a long historical nap.
The three-story department store was inaugurated
by the Sednaoui brothers Samaan and Selim in 1913 and quickly
became a first-class shopping address for rich Cairenes and
foreign expatriates. Its fin de siècle architecture was
inspired by famous European department stores, and especially with
its great atrium it looked like a little sister of the Galleries
Lafayette on Boulevard Hausmann in Paris. Since its
nationalization in 1961, the government hasn’t invested very
much in updating the store. It might sound strange, but this was a
piece of good fortune for the Sednaoui. Due to a lack of money,
the new administration was unable to destroy it with modernization
in the Seventies or by turning it into a mall in the Eighties and
Nineties. Sednaoui stopped being a good choice for shoppers with
its interior design looking more and more worn out while the
management failed to offer a special selection of high-end, trendy
products – but it kept staying what it always was, an elegant
romantic place with an almost untouched shape inside and a great
atmosphere, nothing less than a landmark.
Today’s visitor has just to walk through one
of the entrances and he will find himself carried into the past.
Cast-iron galleries and pillars, wide curved staircases and
balustrades, a ceiling of glass, free-standing elevators, which
still work, and old inscriptions on wood in English and French –
a quiet and relaxing journey back into Cairo’s Twenties and
Thirties. The department store desperately needs some maintenance
and renovation, which will apparently happen after the storehouse
will be privatized again during the next months or years, but in
the meantime, as long as nobody feels the need to do something, no
one will do something bad.
The displayed goods are not really standard
tourist items, but if someone enjoys rummaging around, he may find
hidden treasures among clothes, tableware, toys or other things.
Once I visited the Sednaoui department store with a young German
fashion journalist. He was really excited and insisted to see the
suits, trousers, ties and jackets which have hung there surely
since the Eighties, and with which one can make the whole European
underground club crowd, green with envy.
Sednaoui Department Store. Khazindar Square,
Cairo, near to Al-Ataba Square and near to the multistory Al-Ataba
car park at the northeast corner of Ezbekkiyya Garden.
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