The anniversary SCAF didn’t want John Rees and Joseph Daher report on a historic day in Cairo.

There were two things at stake in today’s first anniversary demonstration in Cairo: how big would it be and what would be its political character?

The ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) must have hoped that the scale of the demonstration would not rival those of the 18 days of the revolution that toppled Mubarak a year ago. And they were definitely framing the demonstration as a national celebration of an event that was over, rather than an affirmation of revolutionary energy.

SCAF lost out on both counts. From yesterday afternoon Tahrir began to fill with crowds. Buses from outlying areas were already bringing protestors to the Square. By late last night some estimates said that there were already 35,000 in Tahrir.

But the real test was always going to be what happened today, particularly what happened to the feeder marches which brought people from the Cairo districts, particularly the poor areas, into Tahrir.

These feeder marches have always been critical and yet they are little understood outside Egypt. They make the Egyptian experience different to the Occupy movement, even though the Occupy movement was inspired by the Egyptian revolution.

The feeder marches begin early in the day with activists touring localities pulling together a march. These then head towards Tahrir from all points of the compass. They connect Tahrir to a wider population and often are more militant than the central demonstration. Today some of these were huge. Some say there were 100,000 on the march that came over the Kasr il Nil bridge alone. Many could not get into the Square because it was already full. All demanded the downfall of SCAF. Four marches were led by the most radical of the youth coalitions. The organisers had hundreds of paper masks printed with the faces of those who have been killed during the revolution and these were worn by the marchers.

These fed into a Tahrir square that was full long before they arrived in the mid afternoon. Here too the banners that predominated were demanding the end of the SCAF regime. Pictures of Field Marshall Tantawi with blood on his hands, and chants of ‘leave’, once aimed at Mubarak are now aimed at SCAF, set the tone in Tahrir. One group of demonstrators passed by chanting ‘Tantawi is the son of a dog’.

If SCAF thought that it was going to turn Tahrir into a place where the least conscious elements of the population overwhelmed the revolutionary vanguard then they had not succeeded by this evening.

But this is only the half time result. The dangerous time will come later in the evening when some of the crowds go home, when the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists supporters leave the Square, and some protestors try to maintain a sit in.

This is a tactic hotly debated on the left with some feeling that sit ins that do not have mass support simply isolate the vanguard and make it easier for the security forces to attack.

We will not know the balance of forces until later tonight, although the total absence of any police or security forces all day is a sign that SCAF had little appetite to confront the full force of the revolution.

Today will not settle the future of the revolution. But it proves beyond doubt that it has a future.