Some 6 percent of Egyptians are Coptic Catholics. This is a section of Cairo that once had dozens of Coptic Catholic churches and still has quite a few. We visited this section and it wasn’t much different from the other sections of Cairo. The first photo is just one of the Coptic Catholic Churches.

The second photo is called the Hanging Church or Suspended Church. It’s built on top of the water gate of Roman Babylon. It was a beautiful church. We also visited several others.

In this same area, we visited the Ben Ezra Synagogue. It is claimed that on the very spot of this synagogue, the pharaoh’s daughter found Moses in the reeds as this was at the water’s edge of the River Nile back then. There’s a bunch of history to the place, but who knows.

The third photo is just one I took in the area behind the Hanging Church. You can see in the photo how all the Nile floods have changed the elevation over the years and also that people just kept building up on top of older buildings.

The Nile no longer gets up this high since the dams were put in up river. For that reason, we now see situations such as the last photo, where they can safely build lower down.