Travelling second class. Czech tourists between national identity and Europeanness in Cairo, 1890s–1930s

Abstract

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European tourism overseas often developed in the wake of colonial expansion and European hegemony. This was the case with Cairo, which developed into a main tourist location for well-to-do Europeans during the nineteenth century. Colonial interests and modernisation projects turned the Egyptian capital into a centre of both colonial and tourist endeavours, drawing ever more Europeans to visit the ‘land of the pyramids’ and the ‘cradle of mankind’. These tourists returned home with images of ancient and modern Egypt, of European rule and colonial power. This article focuses on Czech tourists visiting Cairo from the late nineteenth century and throughout the interwar period, considering their involvement in Cairo as ‘noncolonial tourism’. Based on the concept of ‘imaginative geography’ as used by Derek Gregory, Czech tourists followed general European categories of ‘West’ and ‘East’, or of ‘Europe’ and ‘non-Europe’ when describing Egypt in their travelogues. While they identified with the ‘West’ and ‘Europe’, they also scripted a colonial Cairo that was foreign to them. In contrast, they constituted a ‘Czech Cairo’ as a counterpart, which allowed the travellers to stay outside the rigid colonial logic of ‘coloniser’ and 'colonised’ to some extent.