Mena house strums egyptian charm

In 1971, Mohan Singh Oberoi turned a hunting house at the foot of the Great Pyramid to one of the most famous hotels in the world. Thirty-five years on, it still is the most profitable overseas property of the Oberoi group

One would be searching to conjure up a more hypnotic setting for a heritage hotel in the ancient Orient. Just minutes from the fabled Gizeh pyramids, the lonesome Sphinx in its shadows and the eternal Nile flowing nearby. Up above, an ethereal blend of crimson sky, eagles in flight and the sun going down behind the pyramids.

Back in 1971, the late Mohan Singh (MS) Oberoi was perhaps smitten by the historic setting of the Mena House, a Victorian relic at the foot of the Great Pyramid on the edge of Cairo. When he arrived on the scene, the Mena House, originally a hunting lodge, had been taken over by the Egyptian government.

But that didn’t deter the legendary Indian hotelier from securing management rights and rechristening it the Mena House Oberoi. Under Oberoi’s stewardship, the Mena House went on to become a select member of the ‘most famous hotels of the world’.

Even 35 years on, it remains one of the most profitable overseas properties managed by the Oberoi group. A venture that continues to generate a steady 6% return on investment for its owners — the Upper Egypt Hotel & Co and Egyptian General Co for Tourism & Hotels.

In a country with the largest number of Unesco-listed world heritage sites and where tourism garners over $4bn annually in forex earnings, courtesy some 8.6m visitors coming to see the pyramids every year, the mood is one of gentle optimism in Oberoi circles. “For MS, the Mena House was always something like the ‘Old Grand’ in Calcutta... a gem,” recalls Hany Aziz, who’s been part of the hotel’s management team for over 20 years.

For those with a taste for the sun and classical antiquity, the world is perhaps bereft of enduring monuments that even come close to rivalling the Gizeh pyramids in evoking the timeless expression of pharaohnic majesty and power. But that said, the Mena House Oberoi, set against the stunning backdrop of the pyramids of Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure, has its fair share of anecdotal lore.


Taking its name after Egypt’s first pharaoh King Mena who lived around 4400 BC, the one-time hunting lodge started hosting guests of the ‘Khedive’ (Viceroy) Ismail Pasha back in 1869, the year the Suez Canal opened. Frenchman Jean-Francoise Champollion had recently cracked the elusive hieroglyphic code, the key to the ancient pictorial writing system found in Egyptian monuments. Something that resuscitated fascination with the Nile Valley civilisation, and suddenly the world was headed to the pyramids.

Not surprisingly, by 1883, the old world ‘khedival lodge’ was acquired by a Fredrick and Jessie Head, an English couple on their honeymoon. Soon, another English couple, Hugh and Ethel Locke-King, bought the house from the Heads and resolved to build an oriental palace facing the pyramids. ‘Mena House Hotel’, as it was originally called, opened in circa 1886 and an Austrian Baron Ernst Rodakowski became its first manager.

And within months, its elegant, domed dining room, the ‘Al Rubayyat’, was subject of fashionable gossip from Marseilles to Imperial India. It would take another 93 years before the ‘Al Rubayyat’ would be declared the high-security venue for the Egypt-Israel peace talks in 1979 which was attended by then US president Jimmy Carter, Egypt’s president Anwar Sadat and then Israel premier Menachem Begin.

Earlier, in the heat and dust of World War II, the Mena House had hosted the famous Cairo conference in November 1943 when Sir Winston Churchill, General Chiang Kai Sheik and FD Roosevelt spent five days thrashing out a strategy to force the Japanese to surrender unconditionally to the Allies.

As we strolled through the sprawling palace grounds, Hany (a Holmes buff) revealed to my utter surprise that one of Mena House’s most celebrated guests was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who had arrived in the winter of 1895-96. It’s well known in Sherlockian circles that shortly after publishing his 25th Holmes book in 1894, he killed Holmes in the ‘Final Problem’, apparently to pursue more serious writings.

But what’s perhaps not too well known is that when Sherlock Holmes’ famous creator checked into the tranquil colonial refuge of the Mena House en route to Jerusalem, his wife Louise had just been diagnosed with tuberculosis (consumption in those days!), and the Conan Doyles chose the salubrious environs of the hotel to spend that winter of discontent.

What will also perhaps never be unravelled is whether his wife’s illness holds the key to the singular riddle of Sherlock Holmes’ apparent passing in ‘The Final Problem’, for he would soon be brought back to life in `The Adventure of the Empty House’ after Conan Doyle returned to England.

In the shadow of the tomb of Khufu, this may well remain one of the Mena Hotel’s best-kept secrets, almost perfectly in sync with the silence and mysterious spell of the brooding pyramids.