The site of the Hanging Church was occupied by a Christian place of worship as early as the 3rd century CE, making it among the earliest Christian cult sites in Cairo. The current structure was built primarily in the late 7th century CE, following the Arab conquest of Egypt in 641 CE, with significant additions and restorations in the 9th, 11th, and 13th centuries. The patriarchal throne of the Coptic Pope was located here for several periods in the medieval era, and numerous Coptic Popes were installed and buried in the church.
The church’s extraordinary wooden iconostases and ceiling decorations date primarily from the Fatimid period (10th–12th centuries CE), when the Coptic community under the relatively tolerant Fatimid Ismaili rulers undertook a major program of church beautification and decoration. This period produced the finest Coptic woodworking surviving anywhere in Egypt, and the Hanging Church’s interiors represent its peak achievement.
The church has been continuously used for Coptic worship since its founding — a period of over 1,300 years. It appears in the accounts of medieval Arab geographers, was visited by Napoleon’s scientific expedition in 1798, and has been the subject of scholarly study since the 19th century. A comprehensive restoration project in the late 20th century stabilized the structure and cleaned the wooden decorative elements, revealing the full quality of the carving beneath centuries of candle smoke.
