Cairo’s Baron Empain palace opens after restoration

This two-minute news package comes from AP Archive, the footage library of the Associated Press, and records the reopening of the Baron Empain Palace in Heliopolis, Cairo, on June 30, 2020. President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi inaugurated the building that Monday at the end of three years of restoration, and the palace opened to visitors for the first time.

AP’s notes say the work began in 2017 and was carried out by the Egyptian army’s engineering unit and the Arab Contractors company, at a cost of about 175 million Egyptian pounds, roughly 11 million US dollars. They describe it as the first restoration in the palace’s history, and point out that before it the building’s exterior was a dusty yellow. The palace itself was commissioned by the Belgian industrialist Édouard Empain on desert land he had bought north-east of Cairo, and designed by the French architect Alexandre Marcel in a style inspired by the temples of Angkor Wat.

For half a century before this footage was shot, the palace stood empty, its ownership tangled and its gardens overgrown, and that emptiness is what made it Cairo’s most famous haunted house. Stories told of a revolving tower, a woman of the family killed in a fall, lights and screams in the night; none of them is supported by a published record. In the 1990s it was linked to a moral panic over “devil worship” among young heavy-metal fans, ending in mass arrests in January 1997 and charges dropped for lack of evidence.

Seen against that history, the restored, freshly painted building in this video is the opposite of a haunted ruin, and part of the point of the restoration was to replace rumour with the documented story of Heliopolis. Figures for the cost vary between reports; the ones above are AP’s.