To most people, the name of Rosetta evokes the famous Rosetta stone and the history of the decipherment of hieroglyphs by Champollion in 1822. Situated on a strategic location between the Mediterranean and a western branch of the Nile, Rosetta was known as Poulbotine and contained a temple dedicated to the cult of Cleopatra. The name Rekhit was used from the Coptic period, later turned into Rashid. In 853 AD, the Abbasid Caliph ordered a town to be built on the site of the old ruins of Poulbotine as a protective fortification against sea invaders. The town was occupied by King Louis IX of France during the Crusades in 1249. During the Mameluke period, Rashid was an important trading town with a large harbor, merchant houses, mosques, inns and public baths. The Mameluk Sultan Qayitbay built a castle and ordered many houses and mosques to be built there. Its prosperity continued under Ottoman rule, and it attracted the attention of both Britain and France.
Today there are 180,000 inhabitants and the city is an important center for agriculture, handicraft and the industry.
Several unique houses are preserved in the city center, making Rosetta one of the most important towns in Egypt for Ottoman architecture. 22 houses, twelve mosques, baths and a mill are currently registered by the SCA, although there are other historically important structures that should receive full protection and proper management. The houses are built in a distinctive 'Delta-style", with either three or four floors, and characteristic red and black brickwork on the facade. The ground floor was typically used for the running of the business and the house: it contained the cistern, stables and storehouses. The second floor was reserved for the men of the house, the third floor for the women and the last floor was used as sleeping quarters.
The houses often contain elaborate mashrabiyyas (wooden window grilles), vast reception rooms, decorative inscriptions, inlaid sea-shell woodwork, domes and ornamented doors. Houses were provided with fresh water tanks, and usually each house had a drinking fountain (sabil), made available to passers-by.
Today, these Ottoman houses are crumbling and suffering from neglect, humidity and a high water table. The subsoil water, lack of proper sewage systems, and exposed location on the Mediterranean coast are causing the woodwork to deteriorate and salt to form, destroying the brickwork. The modern urban constructions in the city are encroaching on the buildings and there is an irrevocable loss of historical context and the ancient city center is disappearing rapidly. This became all too clear in May 2005, when one of the Ottoman houses collapsed, leaving nothing but a pile of brick and wood. The house has been official property of the SCA since 1951 and should therefore have received legal protection, conservation and preservation measures! The city's problems have become too urgent to be ignored, and concrete means of intervention must be put in place immediately.
The “Rosetta work-group”ť was created as an Italian-French-Egyptian initiative composed of the schools of Bari and Paris Belleville and EAIS in Cairo in 2004. The project in Rosetta was divided into two main parts: 1) Protect and evaluate the heritage of Rosetta by giving the Ottoman houses an active role within the organization of the town and 2) to restore to the town an urban face representative of its past by elaborating on different intervention projects.
During three months, a French team of eight people concentrated on the formulation of a serious documentation, in order to create a solid base for the work to be accomplished in situ. An urban study of the town was conducted through a series of diagnostics (planning, inventory, allocation of the buildings). This analysis resulted in two propositions for urban interventions: one for the town’s central coach and microbus station and surrounding area, and the other along the corniche.
This work was continued by a team of four students from DESS de Paris Belleville, who worked with EAIS in Cairo for two months during the summer of 2005. The importance of Cultural Resource Management (CRM) as related to documentation was stressed and the documentation and registration should lead to preservation of the buildings and the creation of long term plans for their management. Their work included CRM proposals for the city, a recommendation for each building for possible rehabilitation projects, and a proposal for the rehabilitation of al-Amasyali house as a music center. They also emphasized that there is a need to establish local association with enough powers to implement and maintain the suggested projects. Finally, they presented recommendations for ameliorating the current national and local urban and heritage laws and regulations.
In January 2008, a new phase of the Rosetta project was initiated as the EAIS Association received a grant from the European Commission’s Europaid programme for local actions, administered by their delegation to Egypt, to collect and publish the results of the previous work, as well as to complete the documentation of the cultural heritage of Rosetta. This new project, Reviving the Mediterranean Cultural Heritage of Rosetta, will continue for 9 months and aims to highlight the Mediterranean aspects of this little known city to promote intercultural dialogue and mutual understanding between all Mediterranean people. It will be concluded with the launch of two publications: a Historical Atlas of Rosetta which is intended for local and international heritage professionals and a small guide to the monuments and culture of Rosetta for the general public. Both publications will be bilingual (Arabic and English). In addition, an exhibition promoting the city and presenting the results of the project will be held in Cairo in September 2008.
http://ec.europa.eu/europeaid/index_en.htm
http://www.delegy.ec.europa.eu/en/index.htm
“This document has been produced with the financial assistance of the European Union. The contents of this document are the sole responsibility of the EAIS Association and can under no circumstances be regarded as reflecting the position of the European Union.”
