Presidential Palace, Khartoum

Standing on the bank of the Blue Nile in central Khartoum, the Republican Palace has served as the seat of Sudanese heads of state since independence. The original nineteenth-century building was the site where the British general Charles Gordon was killed during the Mahdist siege of 1885, and later where the flags of independence were raised in 1956. An adjoining museum in a former colonial church displays historical artefacts. The riverside compound remains the symbolic centre of national power.