National News
Mission Nearly Accomplished
By Cam McGrath
Apr 19, 2003, 15:12

Shaping raw limestone blocks with primitive tools, Ahmed Abdel Kader is rebuilding Alexandria's most visible landmark one stone at a time. The old mason works among a pile of uncut limestone against the outer wall of Qaitbey Fort, spending over an hour on each block, chopping it with an axe and shaping it with a heavy raking hammer. It's back-breaking work, and finishing four blocks per day is an admirable feat, even for someone half his age.

In the three years he's worked on the 15th-century fort, Abdel Kader has hewn thousands of blocks. Each is like a puzzle piece, with specific attributes for its preordained position in the fort's cream-colored walls. Restoring those walls is part of a LE 4-million restoration project begun in 2000, when archaeologists sounded the alarm. Powerful waves breaking against the fort's northern outer wall and strong currents had carved out a seven-meter-long tunnel beneath the monument's foundation. A few more meters and the entire northern wall and its towers would have collapsed into the sea. With the winter storm season approaching, the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) rushed to save the historic building from imminent destruction. "One more wave and the fort would have collapsed," recalls El-Sayed Ibrahim, a local fisherman who has been coming to the rocky promontory for more than 40 years.

Engineers blocked the tunnel and used pumps to clear out the seawater inside. They then drilled three holes in the floor of the fort and injected cement into the cavern below to consolidate the foundation. With the cavern filled, a breakwater was needed to keep waves from slapping against the side of the structure. Experts toyed with several designs, dismissing an offshore jetty as too ugly and a submerged breakwater as counterproductive. "A submerged breakwater is useless in this area," explains Adel Mohammed Fahin, an engineering professor who worked as a consultant on the project. "The waves will still form in front of the submerged breakwater and then again behind it with a lot more current."

Eventually they decided to extend and augment the fort's revetment. Engineers created a cement corniche on the seaward side of the fort, allowing visitors to wander around back for the first time. Layers of cement blocks slope downward into the sea, buffering the corniche and giving fishermen and young couples a perch.

"Come during a storm and you will still get wet," says Fahin. "But only from the spray." Should a storm arise in the northeast, the fort could still be in trouble. "We still have a part that is not protected in the east," he says. "We have a problem with submerged antiquities there."

Apparently thousands of pharaonic and Ptolemaic artifacts litter the seafloor just a stone's throw from Qaitbey Fort. A French archaeological team led by Jean-Yves Empereur has been excavating the site since 1994 and has demanded more time to complete the work. Empereur believes at least some of the larger pieces were once part of the Pharos lighthouse, one of the Seven Wonders of the World. Built in 281 B.C., the ancient lighthouse stood for 1,600 years before collapsing in an earthquake in 1349. A century later, Mamlulk sultan Ashraf Qaitbey built his citadel on its ruins. Qansuh Al-Ghouri added galleries for cannons in the 16th century, and Khedive Mohammed Ali beefed up the fortifications in the 19th, but all in vain. The British Navy almost leveled the limestone fort in a cannon barrage in 1882.

Restorations over the past 100 years were sloppy and flawed. "The last restoration was in 1984, but there were some mistakes, like covering the face of the stones with cement mortar in order to paint it later," says Dr. Mohammed Abdel Aziz, general manager of the SCA's Islamic and Coptic Antiquities Department. "Our preference in this restoration is to use the stones without covering them."

Abdel Aziz admits this is not true to the original design, as workers in Mamlulk times plastered walls with a casing mix of lime and ashes, but he says using traditional methods would be overly time-consuming. Unfortunately, the result is incongruity. While the average tourist might coo at the fresh stone work, the lack of a plaster finish makes restored areas stand out like a sore thumb. And while the tops of walls are generally flat, one stretch has newly-added ramparts that give the impression there's some Disneyfication going on.

Abdel Aziz defends the decision to affix ramparts, explaining that an earlier restoration omitted this original feature. "A committee restored the fort in 1936, but the restoration was not complete," he says. "They made the walls flat [on top], but you can see more [ramparts] in the southeast corner of the fort. They have existed since the time of Al-Ghouri."

The restoration work coincided with an excavation inside the fort that revealed two long-lost gates, cisterns and a tower base. "The tower was [incorporated] into a new wall added later when the British Army occupied the area in 1882," says Abdel Aziz. "When we saw its foundation, we dismantled the wall and restored the tower so that it is now visible and people can see it as it looked in the 15th century."

The SCA also added a wheelchair-access feature. Inconspicuous bypass slopes can now be spotted near many of the fort's staircases.

Project officials expect to complete the work in the coming months, paving the courtyard and possibly creating an exhibition area. The fort's safeguard and facelift are the final chapter in an extensive renovation of the Qaitbey promontory, including a tidy new corniche, an upscale restaurant and an artificial lagoon.

"It's much better for people to visit," says lifetime Alexandria resident Ali El-Doghri. "There are nice benches where we can sit, and the fishermen have a place."


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