Bab Zuwayla

This guide to Bab Zuwayla in Cairo opens on April 15, 1517, with the last Mamluk sultan, Tuman Bay the Second, hanged from the gate on the order of the Ottoman conqueror Selim. It reaches back to the gate's founding in 1092 by the vizier Badr al-Jamali and to 1260, when the sultan Qutuz had Mongol envoys beheaded here rather than surrender the city. It also traces how the twin minarets crowning the gate came nearly two centuries later, added for a mosque next door, and the local ritual of tying scraps of hair and cloth to the old wooden doors.