Banque Misr Headquarters

Banque Misr was founded on 13 April 1920 by Talaat Harb with Joseph Cattaui and Joseph Cicurel, on the rule that its capital, its management and its shareholders would all be Egyptian and that it would keep its books in Arabic. Every other bank in the country was foreign-owned; the National Bank of Egypt was British. When the bank built itself a head office on Mohamed Farid Street, finished in 1927, it went to Antonio Lasciac, an Austro-Italian from Gorizia who had by then spent four decades in Egypt and had served as court architect to the Khedive. He gave it a front in the Mamluk manner: banded brick and pale stone, a tier of pointed arches on colonnettes, carved medallions and inscription panels, timber mashrabiya oriels hung out over the pavement, a clock turret on the corner. The bank of Egyptian economic nationalism announced itself in the architectural language of medieval Cairo, drawn by a European. It holds bank offices still.