El Sakkakini () is a small district (quarter) in

Cairo Cairo ( ; , ) is the Capital city, capital and largest city of Egypt and the Cairo Governorate, being home to more than 10 million people. It is also part of the List of urban agglomerations in Africa, largest urban agglomeration in Africa, L ...

Egypt Egypt ( , ), officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a country spanning the Northeast Africa, northeast corner of Africa and Western Asia, southwest corner of Asia via the Sinai Peninsula. It is bordered by the Mediterranean Sea to northe ...

that neighbours the El Zaher and Abbaseya districts. El Sakkakini was originally part of El Zaher, but it was named after a huge building built by a prominent French architect, and was owned by the head of the Syrian Skakkini family, Count Gabriel Habib Sakkakini Pasha (1841–1923), consisting of a palace and a church in the same area in 1897. In addition, Sakkakini Pasha, is known to have established the Roman Catholic Patriarchate in Faggala and the Roman Catholic Cemetery in Old Cairo.

Famous residents

* Taha Hussein * The Palestinian president

Yasser Arafat Yasser Arafat (4 or 24 August 1929 – 11 November 2004), also popularly known by his Kunya (Arabic), kunya Abu Ammar, was a Palestinian political leader. He was chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from 1969 to 2004, Presid ...

was raised in Sakkikini in the 1930s. * The composer Halim El-Dabh was born in Sakkakini in 1921.

Famous residents

References

See also