สถานที่ข่านเอลคาลีลีKhan el-Khaliliخان الخليلي

The quarter is named after a stable-master. During Sultan Barquq's first reign, between 1382 and 1389, his amir akhur Jaharkas al-Khalili pulled down the Fatimid royal mausoleum that stood here — the Turbat az-Za'faraan, the Saffron Tomb — and put up a large khan in its place. He is reported to have thrown the bones of the Fatimid caliphs onto the rubbish hills east of the city. The khan took his name, then the whole district did.

Sultan al-Ghuri, the last effective Mamluk sultan, demolished al-Khalili's building and rebuilt it in 1511, laying out a souq with monumental stone gates. Two of those gates still stand on Sikkat al-Badistan. By the end of the Mamluk period there were 21 khans and wikalas here; by the end of the 18th century, some 39. El-Fishawy's coffeehouse, still in the lanes, was established in 1773.

The present trade is aimed at visitors and at Cairenes in different lanes. Shops sell souvenirs, antiques and jewellery; the goldsmiths' souq still serves locals; crafts workshops run in the courtyards and upper floors. The scholar Remke Kruk found books on magic and sorcery well represented in street stalls and bookshops across the Muslim world around 2005, from Marrakesh to Cairo to Yemen, alongside religious pamphlets condemning the practices those books describe — an argument conducted stall to stall, in print, in the same streets.

Inference — the pharaonic amulet shapes a visitor buys here — scarab, wedjat eye, ankh — are jewellery made now, not survivals. This atlas has read no source that surveys what the Khan's stalls actually stock, so the record stops at what the goldsmiths' souq and the workshops are documented to be.

The market has twice been attacked. A suicide bombing on 7 April 2005 killed 21 people; a second attack on 22 February 2009 killed a 17-year-old French visitor and injured 22 people.

Trading, and oriented to tourism in its best-known lanes, as of the most recent published account this project has read. No day is marked open or closed below: the district's hours are the individual shopkeepers' and nobody publishes them as a timetable.