6th of October City
— — a planned city named for a single morning.
Not only on a wall.
“West of the Giza pyramids, on the high desert plateau where the city of Cairo gives up and the sand begins. A planned city laid out in 1979, named for the morning of October 6, 1973, when Egyptian forces crossed the Suez Canal. Wide boulevards, university campuses, the studios of Media Production City, and the Sahara at the end of every street.
6th of October City, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
6th of October City is a planned satellite city of Cairo, on the desert plateau roughly 20 miles west-southwest of central Cairo and 11 miles west of the Giza pyramids. It was established by presidential decree in 1979 under Anwar Sadat and named for October 6, 1973, the opening morning of the Yom Kippur War when Egyptian forces crossed the Suez Canal. The city sits in Giza Governorate at about 165 metres elevation. Its population has grown rapidly past half a million residents, with planning capacity well beyond that as Cairo expansion continues west.
The city's name fixes its calendar to a single date — October 6, 1973 — when Egyptian troops crossed the Suez Canal at the opening of the Yom Kippur War. The day is observed each year as Armed Forces Day, a national holiday. A large monument to the Unknown Soldier in Cairo marks the same crossing, and the date carries political weight across the country. The city was conceived as part of Sadat's policy to draw population and industry off the Nile floodplain into the desert hinterland.
The city is reached from central Cairo on the 26th of July Corridor or the Cairo-Alexandria Desert Road, with the drive usually running 40 to 60 minutes depending on traffic. Within the city, the Egyptian Media Production City covers more than 3 square kilometres of studio lots and serves much of the Arabic-language television industry. Several private universities, including 6th of October University founded in 1996 and Misr University for Science and Technology, anchor the eastern districts. Most visitors come for work or study rather than tourism.