Gayer-Anderson Museum

In 1934 a retired British army surgeon named John Gayer-Anderson sits in a crumbling Ottoman mansion beside the mosque of Ibn Tulun, cleaning a small bronze cat. The guide follows how he talked Egyptian authorities into a rare lifetime lease on two joined merchant houses dating to 1540 and 1632, and filled twenty-nine rooms with carpets, screens and antiquities gathered from Damascus to Delhi. Look up at the wooden lattice screens above the courtyard as you listen, where locals still tell a story about the fountain below.