The old route to the Cairo airport travels through suburban Heliopolis. Ostentatious mansions abut the main thoroughfare, Saleh Salem Street, among them a sand castle-like fortress constructed by the man who subdivided the neighborhood. The Panorama (or Banorama, as the word is pronounced in the Egyptian accent) does not quite fit the neighborhood. From Saleh Salem, drivers are treated to a sudden outcropping of tanks, warplanes and Egyptian flags. And upon entering the monument, the wonders only increase. The outside walls bear exultant imagery of soldiers and the grounds hold tools of war.
Inside, the donwstairs entry way has wall-to-wall imagery. There is a huge mosaic of the signing of the peace accord, multiple raised-relief images of war or of Pharaonic themes, and even some collaged explanations of the war and its participants.
The site’s longer title is the 6 October War Panorama. It was built in 1989 by North Korean architects and craftsmen to celebrate the Egyptian (and greater-Arab) victory in the 1973 war against Israel. According to the understanding of history I learned in school, Egypt did not exactly win this war, but the narrative of the Panorama offers little room for doubt or interpretation.
Like all sites in Cairo, tickets for the Panorama are arranged on a scale, with Egyptians paying very little and foreigners paying quite a lot to enter. This location also offered a reduced ticket price for Arabs, so I very cockily announced to the ticket salesman that I was from Tunis and thus I entered on an Arab ticket and enjoy the Arabic-language tour of the spectacle. My fellow visitors consisted of a few older Egyptians and about 200 rowdy school children.
Before I was allowed to enter the building itself, I toured the grounds. Tanks, planes and bombs involved in the war are displayed here, and I watched as a group of uniformed Egyptian soldiers posed gamely in front of the largest plane for their accompanying photographer. Then one of the many uniformed attendants collected me to take in the main event.
I was ushered upstairs into a massive, round room, and seated in the front row. Soon afterwards, the children streamed into the space and the darkness was pierced with their voices.
The show began with a crash: suddenly I was surrounded by a floor-to-ceiling mural of the war. Carnage, explosions, tanks and soldiers were depicted in photo-realistic detail, and between the chairs and the walls sat smashed tanks, trenches and even a trampled Israeli flag. The audience enjoyed the breadth of this panorama from its seats, for the floor rotated and we were turned slowly around the imagery. All the time, a disembodied voice related the story of the war, complete with explosive sound effects.
It was fantastic.
I then visited the two other halls in the panorama building, neither of which was quite as impressive as the big show. In one, a diorama of the war was animated by tanks and missiles puled on strings and lit by black light and neon paint. Little lightbulbs were lit to indicate explosions. In the second hall, I watched a grainy video with actual footage of the events. After all of the cartoonish imagery and romanticization of martyrdom, the real imagery was a bit of a shock. I left that room sobered to the actual events of war, all of which were swept up into neat tidy packages by the monument and its triumphant, representative style.
I checked out the gift shop and found nothing there but plastic, pharaonic items and oodles of children who insisted upon asking my name and shaking my hand. Then I noticed a photobooth next to the snack bar. Here consumers could get their pictures digitally entered into souvenir photos with Arab celebrities or with pretty much any Arab head of state, past and present.
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