The palace is located in Old Cairo , in Al- Khalifa area, in the Citadel , on Al-Sioufiya Street , branching from Al-Saliba Street . It was established by its owner, Prince Saif al-Din Taz bin Qatghaj , one of the prominent princes in the era of the Bahri Mamluk state , whose name began to appear during the rule of Imad al-Din Ismail bin al- Nasir Muhammad bin Qalawun ( 1343-1345 AD ) until he became, during the reign of his good brother Zain al-Din Haji, one of the princes who had the power to solve and contract in the state at that time.

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century , when Prince Taz’s palace reached the age of five hundred years, the Khedive government decided to transfer the palace to a depository and decided to convert it into a school for girls at the behest of Ali Pasha Mubarak, one of the pioneers of enlightenment .At that time, however, only a few decades passed without the Ministry of Education vacating the palace, not in order to restore and preserve it, after the signs of aging had clearly appeared on it, but it vacated it to convert it into a… storehouse! And because the palace is large and spacious and located in the heart of Cairo, it was qualified, from the Ministry’s point of view, to be the main storehouse for hundreds of thousands of textbooks, dozens of vehicles that were scrapped, and hundreds of tons of scrap of various kinds. Many of his rooms collapsed.

In October 1992, the palace was admitted to the intensive care room after the winds of the famous earthquake blew many of its pillars and pillars. For ten years, the situation remained as it was until clinical death was announced on March 10, 2002, when a large part of the back wall of the palace collapsed, overlooking a narrow alley containing dozens of dilapidated houses inhabited by hundreds of thousands of citizens. The project of restoring the palace was started after it was neglected for long periods, but the task was very difficult due to the damage of many parts.. International houses of expertise and foreign experts considered that the issue had already ended and that any rescue attempts were a waste of time.. and because the most prominent hobbies of Al-Masry in times of distress is challenging the impossible.. or what seems impossible to others..Everyone rushed to the site of the collapsed palace, and in moments, the ventilators and heart massages started working at an extraordinary speed, and the rescue operation took place, and the world stood in amazement as he saw life returning to the palace, which had been restored with indescribable efficiency. since its inception.The work that has been done is wonderful by all standards, and that is why Akhbar Al-Nujoum decided to take you on a quick tour so that you can get to know the story from its inception.The work that has been done is wonderful by all standards, and that is why Akhbar Al-Nujoum decided to take you on a quick tour so that you can get to know the story from its inception.

The total area of ​​the palace is more than eight thousand square meters, and it is a large courtyard in the middle designated as a garden.

The main and subsidiary buildings of the palace are distributed around it on the four sides, the most important of which is the harem pavilion, the seat or the main building designated for reception, annexes, dependencies, and the stable.As for now, nothing remains of these buildings except the two main facades overlooking Al-Sioufiya Street and the background overlooking Sheikh Khalil Alley, from which the collapse began and the seat that was renovated during the era of “Ali Agha Dar Al-Saada”, the owner of the way and the writers attached to the palace, and a small part of the halls of the Haramlek, as well as the newly created halls that were used as stores or study halls in later eras .

The main entrance to the palace is a cohesive block that begins with a rectangular corridor that has a door behind it, one at the end of which is a basement on both sides of which are two entrances, each of which opens onto a rectangular courtyard, which is the courtyard of the palace.

The palace also has a sub-entrance overlooking Sheikh Khalil’s lane, which ancient writings and documents described as the door to the palace’s secret. The palace has a main basement hall that has been completely restored. As for the private part of the harem, it overlooks the courtyard or the garden with a group of windows made of wood’Baghdadli’, which is a unique masterpiece and topped by three round windows, which are known as the Qamariyat and the palace are two iwans, one on the north side and the other on the south side. A drawing of a cup symbolizing the job of a bartender, one of the jobs held by Prince Taz.There is also the seat or the main reception hall, as it consists of two levels connected by a staircase, and in each of its two levels it is a rectangular area overlooking the courtyard in a manner similar to a ‘terrace’ based on three columns of turned wood. There is a wooden skirting at the bottom of the ceiling containing copy writings of the first verses of Surat Al-Fath. Attached to this seat are three halls filled with geometric motifs.

When the collapse began in the back wall of the palace, which overlooks Sheikh Khalil Alley, the emergency team rushed there, where they found that the wall was twenty-five meters high..which is the height of a nine-storey building! Part of it collapsed, and the rest of the wall leaned clearly towards the houses of the neighborhood, and the slope reached half a meter. The initial plan to stop the deterioration had two consecutive parts. The first was to make pillars to stop any new collapse and remove the piles of backfill on the top of the roof, which represent a heavy load that might help in any upcoming collapse. This crack also included building brick shirts or walls around the wall to stabilize it and prevent it from falling. over their heads at any moment but these workers faced this danger and accepted it under their own responsibility!The Pharaonic temples , the most famous and largest of which was the ” Abu Simbel ” temple, noting that the temples, despite their majesty, were in the end coherent stone blocks that were not threatened with collapse, unlike the palace, which was swaying and dancing, in addition to being composed of either blocks, but rather small pieces of stone compared to temples, or wood! This stage was accompanied by an intensive monitoring process for fear of a sudden collapse threatening the lives of the residents of the area and the workers in the project. When the operation was successfully completed, the work team discovered that the slope had receded due to the supports and that the movement of the buildings in general had stopped. The plan to dismantle the entire palace was amended, and it was modified to limit this dismantling to the dilapidated parts only. The largest and most important thing that was dismantled was an entire upper floor that was a major part of the harem.

Likewise, one of the most important areas of the palace that was completed was the bathroom area on the ground and upper floors, which had gypsum ceilings topped with small domes that were full of decorative elements.

And after the first and most dangerous stages were completed, which are the isolation of sensitive parts threatened with falling, either by complete dismantling or by building new walls around them to serve as protective shirts to protect them, the restoration and re-installation of the entire palace began. The last one was in March 2002. This process resulted in the discovery of a huge amount of wooden, metal and stone elements that had the greatest impact on returning the palace to its old splendor with the same original components as possible .

Among the most important archaeological elements of the palace that have undergone treatment and restoration processes are decorative or solid wood, marble and metal elements, and the limestone layer that covers the walls, as well as the bricks and stones with which the walls were built, as well as the writings and drawings that were on top of the pieces, wooden strips and stone blocks. For colors, scanning electron microscopic imaging was performed to find out the extent of the deterioration of the color layers, then the dust extraction process was carried out very carefully, then manual cleaning brushes of different sizes were used to remove the remaining dust and sand. Mechanical cleaning was also used to reveal the positions of wooden anchors and metal nails .It was sprayed with certain chemicals approved by international expertise houses specialized in the treatment and restoration of world antiquities, then this was followed by the completion of the missing wooden parts, either by what was found among the piles of waste or by using the same type of wood used in the ceiling, taking into account the resort to color frills for decorations and writings in the narrowest limits so as not to disturb the integrated and cohesive texture of the decorative and written units. e!

If all these stages and all this precision were for part of the wooden formation in some parts of the palace, then we can imagine the volume of work that was done in dozens of other details such as floors, walls, columns, stairs, metal parts and other components. And what confirms that it is epic is this important and exciting number of discoveries that accompanied the rescue and restoration operations, the most important and most interesting of which was a huge aquarium for ornamental fish that was used in order to give an aesthetic touch, even if there was an opinion that this basin may have been used as a swimming pool for the palace maids!

Also, a fountain was discovered in the ground seat, a waterwheel above a water well that was intended for watering the animals and irrigating the garden, as well as a marble column with a Corinthian crown dating back to the Byzantine era, a water tank that was a source of feeding Ali Agha’s path attached to the palace, and a group of pottery sewers, which are almost identical to the drainage pipes in our modern era.

As for the second sector, to which the hand of repair and restoration has been extended, it is a sabil and the book of Ali Agha Dar al-Sa`ada, and this entire monument is part of the palace of Prince Taz. Prince Ali Agha cut it out of the palace after its abandonment and demolished it around the year 1715 AD. A water cistern was built on it for watering the hot, topped with a book for memorizing the Qur’an. The stone staircase that connects the sabil and the book was in very poor condition.All these defects were treated during the restoration operations , which restored the whiteness with mortar compatible with the original mortar materials, and replaced the non-archaeological floors according to the archaeological origin. The staircase cracks were also injected and secured.