Egyptians love to commemorate their triumphs and tragedies using dates. There is 26th of July Street, honoring either King Farouk’s abdication in 1952 or Gamal Abdel Nasser’s move to nationalize the Suez Canal four years later, depending on whom you ask. There’s the May 15 Bridge across the Nile, whose name marks Naqba Day, or the “catastrophe,” when Israel declared its independence in 1948 and the Palestinians were displaced. There’s even 6th of October City, a Cairo “suburb” of half a million people that celebrates the Egyptian military’s relative success against Israel in 1973. The coup d’état that brought Nasser to power, arguably the event that got Egypt into its current mess, is sometimes called the “July 23rd revolution.”
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