Introduction To Port Said History

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Introduction To Port Said History

The International Famous Port Establishment


Port Said was founded by Sa’id of Egypt on Easter
Monday, April 25, 1859, when Ferdinand de Lesseps gave
the first symbolic swing of the pickaxe to signal the
beginning of construction. The first problem encountered
was the difficulty for ships to drop anchor nearby.

Luckily, a single rocky outcrop flush with the shoreline


was discovered a few hundred meters away. Equipped
with a wooden wharf, it served as a mooring berth for
the boats. Soon after, a wooden jetty was built,
connecting the departure islet, as it quickly became
known, to the beach. This rock could be considered the
heart of the developing city, and it was on this highly
symbolic site, forty years later, that a monument to de
Lesseps was erected.

There were no local resources here. Everything Port Said


needed had to be imported: wood, stone, supplies,
machinery, equipment, housing, food and even water.
Giant water storage containers were erected to supply
fresh water until the Sweet Water Canal could be
completed.
One of the most pressing problems was the lack of stone.
Early buildings were often imported in kit form and made
great use of wood. A newly developed technique was
used to construct the jetties called conglomerate
concrete or “Beton Coignet”, which was named after its
inventor Francois Coignet.

Artificial blocks of concrete were sunk into the sea to be


the foundations of the jetties. Still more innovative was
the use of the same concrete for the lighthouse of Port
Said, the only original building still standing in Port Said.
In 1859 the first 150 labourers camped in tents around a
wooden shed. A year later, the number of inhabitants
had risen to 2000 — with the European contingent
housed in wooden bungalows imported from northern
Europe. By 1869, when the canal opened, the permanent
population had reached 10,000.

The European district, clustered around the waterfront,


was separated from the Arab district, Gemalia, 400
meters (1,300 ft) to the west, by a wide strip of sandy
beach where a tongue of Lake Manzala reached towards
the sea. This inlet soon dried out and was replaced by
buildings, over time there was no division between the
European and Arab quarters.
At the start of the twentieth century, two things
happened to change Port Said: in 1902, Egyptian cotton
from Mataria started to be exported via Port Said; and in
1904 a standard gauge railway opened to Cairo. The
result was to attract a large commercial community and
to raise its social status. In particular, a sizable Greek
community grew up. In 1907, the quickly growing city
had about 50,000 inhabitants, among whom were 11,000
Europeans “of all nations”.

Following the end of the World War I, the directors of


the Suez Canal Company decided to create a new city on
the Asian bank, building 300 houses for its labourers and
functionaries. Port Fouad was designed by the École des
Beaux-Arts in Paris. The houses follow the French model.
The new city was founded in December 1926.

Since its foundation people of all nationalities and


religions had been moving to the city and each
community brought in its own customs, cuisine, religion
and architecture. By the late 1920s, the population
numbered over 100,000 people. In the 1930s, for
example, there were elegant public buildings designed by
Italian architects.
The old Arab Quarter was swallowed up into the thriving
city. Port Said by now was a thriving, bustling
international port with a multi-national population:
Jewish merchants, Egyptian shopkeepers, Greek
photographers, Italian architects, Swiss hoteliers,
Maltese administrators, Scottish engineers, French
bankers and diplomats from all around the world.

All lived and worked alongside the large local Egyptian


community. And always passing through were
international travellers to and from Africa, India and the
Far East. Intermarriage between French, Italian and
Maltese were particularly common, resulting in a local
Latin and Catholic community like those of Alexandria
and Cairo.

French was the common language of the European and


non-Arab population, and often the first language of
children born to parents from different communities.
Italian was also widely spoken and was the mother
tongue of part of the Maltese community since the
ancestors of the latter had come to Egypt before the
Anglicization of Malta in the 1920s.

Multilingualism was a characteristic of the foreign


population of Port Said, with most people continuing to
speak community languages as well as the common
French. Since its establishment, Port Said played a
significant role in Egyptian history. The British entered
Egypt through the city in 1882, starting their occupation
of Egypt.

In 1936 a treaty was signed between the United Kingdom


and the Kingdom of Egypt called the Anglo-Egyptian
Treaty of 1936. It stipulated the British pledge to
withdraw all their troops from Egypt, except those
necessary to protect the Suez Canal and its surroundings.

Following World War II, Egypt denounced the Treaty of


1936, leading to skirmishes with British troops guarding
the Canal in 1951. The Egyptian Revolution of 1952
occurred. Then in 1956, President Gamal Abdel Nasser
nationalised the Suez Canal Company. The
nationalisation escalated tension with Britain and France,
who colluded with Israel to invade Egypt, the invasion
known in Egypt as the tripartite aggression or the Suez
Crisis.

The main battles occurred in Port Said, which played a


historic role in the Suez Crisis. The withdrawal of the last
soldier of foreign troops was on the 23rd of December
1956.[6] Since then, this day was chosen as Port Said’s
national day. It is widely celebrated annually in Port Said.

The French-speaking European community had begun to


emigrate to Europe, Australia, South Africa and
elsewhere in 1946 and most of the remainder left Egypt
in the wake of the Suez Crisis, paralleling the
contemporary exodus of French-speaking Europeans
from Tunisia.

After the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, also called the Six-Day


War, the Suez Canal was closed by an Egyptian blockade
until 5 June 1975, and the residents of Port Said were
evacuated by the Egyptian government to prepare for
the Yom Kippur War (1973). The city was re-inhabited
after the war and the reopening of the Canal. In 1976,
Port Said was declared a duty-free port, attracting people
from all over Egypt. Now the population of the city is
around 1 million.

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