Nostalgic Times
Here is Egypt in the old days when it was under the rule of King Fuad I (reign 1917-1936) and King Farouk (reign 1936-1952). The streets looked more or less empty, well at least compared to nowadays, only a few cars and really a few people walking in the streets of Downtown Cairo.
The population at the time was around 20 million people so would make sense to today's crowds especially in the capital and major cities.
The well dressed traffic officers, the vintage cars, the greenery and scenery all around was luscious with trees, flowers and gardens especially in and around the palaces, hotels, villas and main squares like for example Tahrir Square and Opera Square.
Tahrir Square in 1907 - Image Source
Egyptian Museum - Image Source
The Savoy Hotel in Soliman Pasha Street
The Grand Continental Hotel in Opera Square - Image Source
Nile Cornish - Image Source
As you can see above a collage of photos taken from a reel from Egypt.Zaman, the attire was a mix of cultures with the traditional formal galabeya with the scarf and stick and of course the famous tarboush, with another mix of European attire with men’s clean cut suits either with a tarboush or a formal hat. The ladies' fashion was very eloquent and elegant, where Egypt was known to hold the most up to date fashion shows that models from all around the world would come to participate in, enhanced by the fact that the Egyptian cotton and fabric was at its peak globally, the fashion industry was prominent. This was also highly influenced by the cinema industry, which was regarded to be the third largest in the world.
Acclaimed to be “Hollywood of the Middle East”, Egypt was living its golden age of movie making. The industry started with the first feature-length Egyptian film in 1927 by the name of Laila, produced and starred by Aziza Amir. Various small studios started emerging in the 1930’s and in 1936, Studio Misr, financed by Talaat Harb entrepreneur and founder of Banque Misr, became the leading Egyptian film making studio equivalent to Hollywood’s major studios and kept this rank for thirty years at least.
Anis Ebeid Films, the first subtitling company in Egypt, was established in 1940, by the entrepreneur and translator Anis Ebeid, which made possible the screening of many American, British, Indian, among other global movies for the Egyptian audience.
The music production industry and Egyptian musicians were leading the Middle Eastern scene with the famously worldwide renown Umm Kalthoum and others like Mohamed Abdel Wahab, Mohamad Fawzy, Shadia and Abdel Halim Hafiz to name a few.
Students in front of Cairo University - named King Fuad I University at the time, built in 1908, was considered the second oldest institution of higher education in Egypt where Al-Azhar University was the first. The university was also ranked to be one of the top universities in Africa and the Middle East where students came from the all over the region to study and there was a very rich intellectual stage with eminent alumni like Samira Moussa, the first female Egyptian nuclear physicist in addition in her being the first woman to work at the university, the Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz the famous novelist, Sir Magdi Yacoub, Professor of Cardiology, and the late Palestinan President Yasser Arafat a Nobel Laureate also.