Cultury is a small cultural publication. We write, each month, a handful of notes about the museums of Egypt — the ones you visit on the weekend after you have already walked the famous galleries. The house-museums, the palace-museums, the neighbourhood museums, the single-patron collections, the overlooked rooms in the big institutions. That is our beat.
We publish online at museum-cultury.biz. We have no print edition, no app, no podcast, no video channel. We are two editors and a small stable of occasional contributors, writing from an office at the top of a 1920s building on Safia Zaghloul Street in Raml, Alexandria, two minutes' walk from the tram and three minutes from the sea.
What we do — and what we don't
Each note we publish has been written, in full, by a named editor who has visited the museum in question. We do not republish press releases. We do not commission listicles. We do not use generative AI systems in the preparation or drafting of our copy. We are slow, and this is the point.
We are not a travel magazine. We do not review hotels, recommend guides, compile rankings, or sell tickets of any kind. We do not host advertising, affiliate links, or sponsored content. We accept no commission on anything a reader might do after reading one of our notes. Our reading list costs nothing because it is not intended to make money.
We are funded out of the editors' own pockets. Running a quiet online publication in Egypt is not expensive, and we prefer the independence to the revenue. If the running costs ever outgrow what we can cover ourselves, we will say so on this page, honestly, and think out loud about what to do. We do not plan to introduce advertising.
How we fact-check
Every factual claim in a Cultury note — dates, provenance, attribution, historical context — is checked against at least two of the following: the museum's own published catalogue where one exists; the Supreme Council of Antiquities' publications; peer-reviewed publications in the relevant scholarly field; and, in the case of recent institutional news, direct correspondence with the museum's press office. Where the scholarly consensus is contested, we say so. Where we are uncertain, we are explicit about the uncertainty.
If a note contains a factual error, please write to us. We publish corrections at the foot of the relevant note, dated and summarised honestly. We do not edit errors out quietly.
The editors
Farida Morsi
Farida writes about the cultural life of Cairo and the Delta. A former exhibitions producer for the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, she has been our editor since Cultury began.
Youssef Habib
Youssef covers visual art and the museum landscape of greater Cairo. He holds an MA in Art History from Helwan University.
Photography
The photographs that appear on our pages are — with the rare exceptions labelled as such — taken by us on site, or licensed under Creative Commons from Wikimedia Commons. Every image is credited, with the photographer's name and licence, in the caption of the note in which it appears. If you believe a photograph is incorrectly credited, write to us; we fix such errors promptly.
How to reach the editors
All editorial correspondence should be addressed to [email protected], or mailed to our Alexandria office at the address in the footer. We answer most mail within two working days. We read everything.
We do not organise trips, recommend tour guides, or book hotels. Readers occasionally write asking for this sort of advice, and we regretfully decline; we are not qualified to give it, and our editors' inboxes are small. For travel logistics, the Egyptian Tourism Authority and a licensed local agent are the right places to ask.
A final note
We started Cultury in 2023 because the museums we loved most were the ones getting the least attention, and because we wanted a place — even a small, slow place — to say so. The publication has grown, slightly, in the years since. We hope you find something here worth your weekend.