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The Free Officers' coup

Name: The Free Officers' coup
Start: 1952-07-23
Location: Abdeen Palace, Cairo, Cairo, Egypt

Abdeen Palace, Cairo · Cairo, Egypt · 1952-07-23

Army officers took power overnight and sent King Farouk into exile within days, ending the monarchy.

The record

Date	1952-07-23
Place	Abdeen Palace, Cairo, Cairo, Egypt
Coordinates	30.043, 31.256 (landmark-level precision)
Scope	World-historic
Sources	Wikipedia
Added	2026-08-14 · source: editors

Go deeper. This page records the place, the date and what is tied to them — the full story is told better elsewhere: Wikipedia. What you will not find there is this location’s other time layers, the map, and the memories readers add below.

Coordinates are given at landmark level. A landmark-level coordinate points at the structure; a city-level one points at the settlement, not at a parcel.

Finding photographs

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Wikimedia Commons — freely licensed images, with the licence stated on every file. This is the only source we republish from.
The reference article — its own illustrations, and its citations to archives.
Image search filtered to reusable licences — useful for tracing which institution holds a picture.
National and municipal archives of Egypt, and the picture desks of newspapers published there at the time.

Check the licence before you reuse anything. A photograph being online, or being old, does not make it free; in most countries a 1960s press photograph is still in copyright.

Footage

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Time layers at this place

One place, several moments in time. This location has 3 recorded time layers between 1938 and 1987 — slide through them:

1938

Egyptian National Military Museum

1952

The Free Officers' coup

1987

The Cairo metro opens

1938 — Egyptian National Military Museum
1952 — The Free Officers' coup this page
1987 — The Cairo metro opens

Seeded by the editors. This entry was compiled by us from public reference works and is labelled as such, not presented as a reader’s contribution. Sources are listed on the entry. If you know more, or we have it wrong, tell us — corrections are published.

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What readers have added

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Nearby in Africa

An event, not a property assessment. This page records what happened at a location. It says nothing about the condition, value or safety of any property there, and it is not part of any environmental record. Methodology and limits.