Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said by Lucia Carminati;

Author:Lucia Carminati;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520385511
Publisher: University of California Press

The Plagues of Port Said

Quality and variety in Port Said’s drinking scene notwithstanding, authorities in town did not appreciate these establishments’ business. In the eyes of many contemporary and later observers, the town’s inns and wine shops had become gathering spots for malefactors and especially foreigners. Some visitors expressed the conviction that local authorities had the power to close a bar down if a bloody altercation erupted there, thus interrupting sometimes successful businesses and causing problems for their managers.170 However, foreign owners, managers, and patrons technically remained shielded behind the country’s extant capitulatory regime, which some consequently saw as an obstacle to its “moral and physical purification.”171 Consular representatives loathed Port Said’s drinking places as “the plagues of Port Said.” Similarly, Catholic clergymen saw the cafés, music halls, and bars in town as fundamentally immoral.172 The Egyptian government decreed in 1891 that such venues ought to be located only in commercial neighborhoods, away from families’ residences, religious or educational institutions, and cemeteries or venerated tombs.173 As in the 1860s, authorities persisted in their attempts to regulate the opening and closing times of places of diversion in town (see chapter two). When the Egyptian government had decreed in 1867 that these establishments in Ismailia would lock their doors at 10:00 or 11:00 p.m., it had raised Company officials’ hopes that a similar measure would be taken in Port Said.174 But come 1879, public establishments and brothels in the port city were routinely found open and operating past midnight. The Egyptian subgovernor general blamed them for compromising the safety and the repose of the city’s inhabitants. He argued that such “ignoble establishments and houses” attracted bad subjects who fomented disorder and created the most regrettable scenes, in the wee hours of the night. Ostensibly, after a period of respite due to injunctions from their own consular authorities, the foreign owners of such venues had started contravening police regulations again. Each consulate, the subgovernor general pleaded, ought to place one janissary at the disposal of the police to help them close down these places at midnight sharp, have all kinds of music stopped, and make all customers leave.175

In 1883, attempting a crackdown, the governor decreed that cafés would close down at 10:00 p.m. Only a few could stay open until 12:30 a.m., and then exclusively under the stipulation that social peace be assured (the Eldorado, Casino, Friedmann, Palatine, Café de France [Hôtel], Bletty, Glacier, Neumann, and Fink). If foreign owners wanted to keep venues open part of the night or all night long for public festivities or other reasons, they needed to request from the governorate a special authorization via their consular authority. Consular representatives all agreed to this measure. Nonetheless, in 1884 the closing time was once again modified and was pushed to 11:00 pm rather than 10:00 p.m. For those owners who wanted to keep their establishments open past the fixed hours, the possibility to obtain special authorizations was still contemplated.176 Accordingly, all the consuls in the city were notified, signs

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