Half day tour to hanging church and synagogue

Itinerary:

The interior of this 9th-century (some say 7th-century) church, renovated many times throughout the centuries, has three barrel-vaulted, wooden-roofed aisles. Ivory-inlaid screens hide the three haikals (altar areas), but in front of them, raised on 13 slender pillars that represent Christ and his disciples, is a fine pulpit used only on Palm Sunday .One of the pillars, darker thanthe rest, is said to symbolize Judas. In the baptistery, off to the right, apanel has been cut out of the floor revealing the Water Gate below. From here there is a good view of one of the gate's twin towers.

Ben Ezra Synagogue used to be a Christian place of worship by the name of El-Shamieen Church and according to a legend, the building was built on the exact spot where Moses was found as a baby in his basket. However, when the Coptic Christian sowing it weren’t able to pay the annual taxes imposed by the Muslim rulers any longer, they had to sell the church. It was sold to Abraham Ben Ezra, who purchased the building in 882 AD for 20,000 dinars and turned i into a Jewish synagogue. 

The synagogue became a place where North African Jews congregated for major festivals and famous rabbis came to worship on their visits to Cairo. Then, during are storation in 1890, the most famous and diverse Geniza in the world was found .In an empty space below the roof, roughly 300,000 priceless manuscripts were hidden away, a collection that is now known as the Cairo Geniza. The manuscript shave long since been transferred to different libraries, but visitors to the synagogue will still be able to visit this place of historical importance and learn about Coptic and Jewish Cairo. In fact, the Ben Ezra Synagogue is the most visited Jewish site in the city and surprises visitors with the beautiful geometric and floral patterns in the Turkish style.