the city of the dead

The city of the dead stands for the vast graveyards stretching over big parts of central Cairo.


For many Cairenes it is a place of mystery and often misery, a creepy part of the city you don't go in unless you have a good reason.



To Western eyes, who are used to graveyards that are open spaces, grassy with not more than grave markers, flowers and trees, the city of the dead looks quite unusual. Traditionally, Egyptians used to bury their family members in small houses the size of one room, sometimes with a flat roof, so they can live in them during the times of mourning. Don't get the understanding of an actual house with toilet, more simply just 4 walls. This leads to the city or slums like look of the cemetery, and it becomes understandable, why people would find it creepy. There is a whole city laying in front of you, but it's inhabited by the dead.



Almost. Due to the increasingly more difficult and complicated housing situation, population growth and urbanisation, more and more families started moving into the graves. Today it's estimated that over 5 million people live in the city of the dead. When walking around in the cemetery you can find laundry drying out on strings between the gravestones and kids playing everywhere.



I went there yesterday. It was not dangerous, just very impressive. It is huge and I can well imagine that it would be easy to get completely lost in there. Everywhere you can see the small domes of Mausoleums of people who had the money to build more than just a few walls around a grave sticking out. (And between them you find a pile of garbage.)



However you can also see many free standing graves, interestingly in all colours, which makes you think you must be somewhere in south America. (But I decided to shoot a black and white series. I haven't done that in a while and I really like it.)



The city of the dead also turned out to be a place full of small surprises and wonders. The next picture is an example. The drawing on the wall is something showing the Kaaba in Mekka and Muslims circling it. It's a typical thing to draw on your wall to show that you did the pilgrimage. But usually it's on the houses of the living. But here it's on the house of a dead person that hosts a living who did the pilgrimage...



After a while, we came to a mosque. It was quite and happened to be the one on the one-pound bill. We went in and discovered a little wonder. The mosque was beautiful in every detail. A man (Mohamed) walked up to us and gave us one of the best tours I every received in my tourist live. He showed us the small masterpieces and their meaning, he showed us the attached dome and took us all the way up to the highest level of the minaret (which you need to climb and crawl up to and outside have barley one food to stand on and a fence barely higher than your knee...) From there we enjoyed an astonishing view over the city of the dead, the Citadel and even the pyramids.





We walked out of the mosque and per total coincidence found the glass maker that makes the glass that is sold out on the touristic markets (and that we bought in the beginning, but broke a lot of it, and where therefore looking to replace many cups and get new bowls etc :-) )
It was this kind of shop, where the glass is freshly produced in the back of the store, hand blown. A 2 man shop. One blows, one sells. Inside temperature about 40 degrees or more. We bought a completely new kitchen... :-D



After these beautiful and astonishing hours out in the sun, with climbing up and down a minarette, wearing long pants, long sleeves and a head scarve, during Ramadan, with not one drop of water since 4 in the morning, I felt as thirsty as I never felt in my live. All my thoughts started circling around water, it's sound, it's look, it's taste. I experienced real thirst. We grabed our glass, said goodbye to the city of the dead and went home with dry mouths.