S6E5: The Shrines of Alexandria’s Lake Maryut region, with Ismael Awad

On the periphery of Alexandria in the surrounding countryside is the Lake Maryut region, a vast expanse of flat agricultural land that used to be Lake Maryut, now just 18% of its earlier size. The lake separated the city of Alexandria from the rest of the country further south. Yet despite the shrinking of the lake and integration of the rural hinterland with the city during the 20th century the countryside and the cultural heritage that it contains remains under appreciated in Alexandria, as well as in Cairo and further afield. In this episode, Ismael Awad discusses his recent Barakat funded project that surveyed, documented, and photographed the shrines of the Lake Mayrut region and explains their importance to the cultural heritage of Egypt generally and Alexandria specifically.

Ismael Awad is a geographer, cartographer, and GIS research specialist at the Centre d’Études Alexandrines. He completed his PhD in 2020 at Université Lyon 2 where his thesis was titled “The Western Margin of the Nile Delta: Geographical Information Systems on the Antique Settlements of the Maryut Region”. 

This episode is part of our series Peripheries which seeks to push our understanding of the cultural heritage of the Islamic world away from the traditional centres that we associate with it. With a fantastic range of guests we will examine places and topics often considered peripheral to the Islamic world and understand why they are in fact of central importance to the region’s cultural heritage, from Armenia to England, from Ethiopia to West Africa.