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 Cairo ( ; , ) is the capital and largest city of Egypt and the Cairo Governorate, being home to more than 10 million people. It is also part of the largest urban agglomeration in Africa, the Arab world, and the Middle East. The Greater Cairo ...

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 Syrians () are the majority inhabitants of Syria, indigenous to the Levant, most of whom have Arabic, especially its Levantine and Mesopotamian dialects, as a mother tongue. The cultural and linguistic heritage of the Syrian people is a blend ...

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 Old Cairo (, Egyptian pronunciation: Maṣr El-ʾAdīma) is a historic area in Cairo, Egypt, which includes the site of a Babylon Fortress, Roman-era fortress, the Christian settlement of Coptic Cairo, and the Muslim-era settlement of Fustat that ...

Famous residents

Taha Hussein Taha Hussein (, ; November 15, 1889 – October 28, 1973) was among the most influential 20th-century Egyptian writers and intellectuals, and a leading figure of the Arab Renaissance and the modernist movement in the Arab world. His sobriquet ...

* The

Palestinian president The president of the State of Palestine () is the head of state of Palestine. Yasser Arafat became the first titular president of the State of Palestine in 1989, one year after the Palestinian Declaration of Independence. The title was origina ...

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 Halim Abdul Messieh El-Dabh (, ''Ḥalīm ʻAbd al-Masīḥ al-Ḍab''ʻ; 4 March 1921 – 2 September 2017) was an Egyptian-American composer, musician, ethnomusicologist, and educator, who had a career spanning six decades. He is particu ...

was born in Sakkakini in 1921.

Famous residents

References

See also