The rich symbolism of the square in Cairo

When she first traveled to Cairo for fieldwork in 1993, Farha Ghannam recalled, Tahrir Square was mostly used as a bus depot.

Today, it's the battleground on which the future of Egypt is being fought - a space rich with symbolism and meaning, held and defended by protesters at the cost of some lives.

"There's this feeling [among demonstrators] that 'if we lose at Tahrir Square, we're going to lose the fight,' " said Ghannam, an anthropology professor at Swarthmore College who studies the use of public space in Egypt.

For 10 days, television cameras and news photographers have beamed and broadcast image upon image from the square, first of mass protests and now of bloody fighting. It can be hard to tell what the square - a big, usually traffic-clogged plaza - actually looks like. And it's impossible for pictures to convey the importance of the place to Egyptians, and how it was the obvious, logical place for the protests to erupt.

No longer mostly a stopping point for buses, the square remains the hub of the Cairo transportation system, busy with cabs, cars, and subways, and with people coming and going. In a society sharply divided by class and gender, the square has been a place where all feel comfortable - young and elderly, rich and poor, men and women, Muslim and Christian.

It's a physical link between old and new, a place central to the Egyptian revolution in 1952. The main office of the American University in Cairo is on the square. So is the headquarters of President Hosni Mubarak's ruling political party, the National Democratic Party.

The square is the center of government power and bureaucracy - a corrupt, inefficient bureaucracy that many Egyptians have come to hate. Across from the main government building stands the Egyptian Museum - a juxtaposition that pits the symbol of a repressive regime against a representation of Egypt's ancient and glorious civilization.

"What happens there determines what happens in Egypt," said Ghannam, author of Remaking the Modern: Space, Relocation, and the Politics of Identity in a Global Cairo. "It's hard to believe that one small space could mean so much, but that's what's happening now."

Ghannam, who has been traveling to and working in Egypt for 17 years, has been in Tahrir Square thousands of times. She knows the square like a National Park Service ranger knows Independence Hall.