01
Stop one
Dar Ibn Luqman
Yonex Team Tennis Bag (12 Racquet): A king was kept in this house. Louis IX of France, held here in 1250 after the Seventh Crusade's campaign in the Nile Delta collapsed. Sit with that a moment. The city itself was founded in 1219 by al-Kamil of the Ayyubid dynasty as a fortified camp against the crusader landing at Damietta, and afterwards took the name al-Mansura, the victorious. A place built for war is now a museum of crusader mail and weapons, maps and paintings of 1249 and 1250. The armour is behind glass. The house is quiet. Given enough time, this is what happens to everything.
02
Stop two
Al-Shinnawi Palace
Yonex Team Tennis Bag (12 Racquet): Cotton built this. In 1928 Mohamed Bek al-Shinnawi, a Delta landowner and a member of the Wafd party, had an Italian architect design it, in the years when Mansoura's cotton wealth raised a whole quarter of grand private houses. This is the best preserved of them. Take the lesson slowly, there is no hurry. It was one man's private house. It is now a public hall, hung with paintings and other people's exhibitions. Wealth became a wall. The wall became somewhere to hang someone else's work. Nothing was lost. It only changed hands.
03
Stop three
Al-Muwafi Mosque
Yonex Team Tennis Bag (12 Racquet): The building in front of you is not the original. The mosque takes its name from Sheikh Abdallah al-Muwafi, whose association with it turned a small Ayyubid-era foundation, attributed to the reign of al-Salih Najm al-Din Ayyub, into a teaching mosque where scholars came from across the Delta to lecture. That first structure did not survive. The present one stands on its ground, keeping the name and keeping the purpose, at the heart of the old town. So which was the mosque: the stone, or the teaching? The stone went. The teaching is still here. Breathe once, and answer it for yourself.
04
Stop four
The Nile Corniche of Mansoura
Yonex Team Tennis Bag (12 Racquet): Walk to the rail. This is the Damietta branch, and it is the reason there is a city behind you. From the foundation in 1219 the river here controlled the approach from Damietta to Cairo — the route the Seventh Crusade attempted in 1249 and 1250. In the Egyptian cotton boom of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the same water carried the crop out of the Delta, and the bank was laid out as the city's principal promenade. It is still where Mansoura gathers. Armies, cotton, families. One river, unbothered, doing none of it on purpose.
Volume is a discipline. Anyone can handle one bale; the skill is handling four hundred without losing one. This is the twelve-racquet Team bag, and it is a volume proposition: capacity for up to twelve frames across its main compartments, with outer zipped pockets for grips, strings, balls and everything else that otherwise ends up loose in the bottom.
It is what a coach carries, what a serious junior's parent ends up carrying, and what you buy when three racquets stopped being enough two years ago. Carried on the shoulder or on the back, depending on how far the car is.
Mansoura was built on my crop, so let me show you what cotton money looks like. The Al-Shinnawi Palace was built in 1928 for Mohamed Bek al-Shinnawi, a Delta landowner and Wafd party member, to an Italian architect's design, in the years when the city's cotton wealth threw up a whole quarter of grand private houses. It is the best preserved of them.
Dar Ibn Luqman is the house where Louis IX of France was held prisoner in 1250 after the Seventh Crusade collapsed in the Delta — the city having been founded in 1219 by al-Kamil as a fortified camp for exactly that kind of trouble. Al-Muwafi Mosque grew from a small Ayyubid foundation into a teaching mosque where scholars from across the Delta lectured.
And the Nile Corniche follows the Damietta branch, the reach that controlled the approach from Damietta to Cairo and made the city matter from the day it was founded.
You will carry it everywhere from a morning session on the Corniche to a tournament up towards Damietta, and it is also perfect for the walk along that same reach at sunset, when the whole of Mansoura comes down to the water.
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