In the City of the Dead, Artists Are Very Much Alive
Tombs, mausoleums, and living people. From the top of a minaret and right down to the dirt and dust, we photographed and explored the City of the Dead—a Cairo unlike the Cairo we know, where there are quiet, wind-swept streets, street art, laundry hanging out to dry, and artisans who blow glass and reinvent ancient techniques.
It was the first time we had climbed a minaret—even though these tall, slender “lighthouses” had accompanied our adventures so many times and echoed with imperceptible poetry throughout our journeys. “Climb up! Climb up! Carry your shoes in your hands!…,” urged our host, who moments earlier had proudly shown us the magnificent complex of Sultan Qaitbay on the front of the Egyptian one-pound note (the reverse features the statues of the Temple of Abu Simbel), with many of the architectural elements that make the 15th-century mosque one of the most beautiful monuments in Islamic Cairo.
A first flight of stairs leads us to the complex’s terraces and the base of the minaret. We realize how rare this moment is; there are few places in the world where this can happen. We climb alone, without a guide. Before us stands the tower, exquisitely carved from stone and divided into three stories with small windows and ornate balconies that, little by little, step by step, reveal not only the complex built by the Mamluk sultan between 1472 and 1474, the intricately carved domes, the mausoleum, and the sabil (public drinking fountain), but also the tip of a necropolis that stretches over six square kilometers along the base of the Mokattam Hills, a vast cemetery, divided into northern and southern zones, which is a massive shantytown and a poor, vibrant tangle where it is estimated that over a million people live in homes built within or around the graves of family members.
City of the Dead—there it is. The cemeteries, including the Qaitbay area, once lay in the open desert outside the city. Now, they have been swallowed up by the ever-expanding metropolis. It is a city within a city. On the other side of the road, cars are piled up, and every inch seems occupied. On this side, the pace of life is different: the quiet, windswept streets and vast empty spaces still have, at times, an almost desert-like feel where life finds its way. Some people live in funerary structures converted into residential courtyards, others in historic buildings, and still others in hastily built new homes.
The well-known—and yet little-known—City of the Dead has “a complicated history,” Primitiva Dobrowolska, a Polish architect who has lived in Cairo for three decades, tells Primitiva . “This phenomenon of people living among tombs is not new. In the Middle Ages, when rulers and sultans built these complexes, they were designed to be tombs, but also to be used by the living. They were convents for nuns, they were markets, they were sort of like public service facilities and tombs. The fact that people live among tombs has existed since the 14th century. And then, in the 20th century, there was a massive expansion of Cairo, which grew from a city of 1.5 million people to over 20 million, as it is today. And that is also reflected in the City of the Dead.”
It’s layer upon layer. “Stigmatized and poor people,” he describes. “It’s not like a gang of criminals living among the graves. They’re ordinary people: there are all kinds of people—some educated, some uneducated. There are many artisans. It’s a very traditional Islamic community: all the women wear headscarves.”
Everyone knows everyone else in this close-knit community. We, too, got to know them: friendly, open, and hospitable people. Groceries are sold at the market, artisans work in their workshops, and in the streets, people hang their laundry and chat. Young men play soccer in empty alleys, and children run about, among the shadows of the bright decorations hanging to celebrate Ramadan.
While at first only the dead rested here, over time, as Cairo’s population grew unchecked, more and more people moved into the area and, in many cases, began living inside the mausoleums of the deceased. Rents are low or nonexistent. Most of the time, the families living inside a mausoleum have no kinship with the deceased. Instead, they have negotiated with the deceased’s family to live there in exchange for tending the grave. It is central, quiet, and close-knit—it is like a cluster of villages; it is like the Cairo of days gone by.
The community of Qaitbay was fortunate that Agnieszka Dobrowolska, who has always dedicated herself to the conservation of Islamic monuments, took notice of it in time. “A fantastic opportunity arose from the European Union, and we applied for a small pilot project in the City of the Dead. It was a small building, a charitable project to provide water for animals. It was like a breath of fresh air and a new approach: we restored it and returned it to the local community, in line with the general approach to heritage conservation around the world. That was in 2015. And, with a bit of luck, we’re still at it.”
Today, it is impossible not to notice what makes this “village” so different from the rest, on the one hand, and even within Cairo’s diverse social mosaic, outside the invisible walls of the City of the Dead.
“Step by step, one by one,” the teams won the trust of the residents, who began to organize themselves and create activities, synergies, and events related to art and handicrafts. “We gained access to the communities through the children and women, because they are more interested. What’s really interesting is that we’ve created a trend by bringing in artists regularly, and people here have started doing graffiti too. We even have our own ‘Banksy’—an artist who’s been painting, and we have no idea who he is,” explains Agnieszka, who highlights successes on multiple levels, from increased productivity and employment to a decline in domestic violence.
More or less hidden in the alleys and small squares, within a 200-meter radius of the minaret, there are trees and floral arrangements (“it’s as if nature needed human beings to be beautiful”) and signs pointing to the workshops of artisans that stand side by side with grocery stores, cafés, and imposing monuments and mausoleums—huge multifunctional religious complexes that permanently employed a considerable number of people. While in most of the world cemeteries are places of silence, here life and death intertwine: the dead in their graves, the living at the table.
Among the tens of thousands of mummies that rest here are kings, saints, writers, caliphs, and artists, and it is the latter who attract curious visitors and tourists and bring in foreign currency to this area. It’s common to see fathers and sons blowing and transforming glass into “precious stones,” or to come across one of the few artisans in the neighborhood who craft the various metal parts for hookahs (shisha), which are ubiquitous in Egypt. Some produce silk cords for fringes and embroidery for galabiyas and abayas; there are bookbinders and those dedicated to creating jewelry inspired by local history, such as the Mashka brand, managed and crafted exclusively by women, who daily transform classic patterns—which also accompany and surprise us on our wanderings—into contemporary designs: necklaces featuring lessons from the madrasa (Koranic school), bracelets featuring cutouts of the facade of the mausoleum built by Qaitbay before he became sultan in 1468—and where he would eventually bury his still-young children—and other objects that draw on the unexpected and inspiring forms of Mamluk architecture.
“One of our goals was to attract cultural tourism, because this place was completely unknown. Taxi drivers didn’t want to come here; the area really had a bad reputation. By working to introduce cultural and artistic events, organizing markets, and convincing people that it’s a pleasant place to be.” Cars drop off tourists at the central square, the epicenter of urban art and artisans and a good starting point for exploring the City of the Dead, which is, after all, the city of the living.
Wandering aimlessly through the city’s rudimentary streets on a late afternoon is literally like traveling through the golden age of Islamic architecture in Egypt and stumbling upon treasures that look dilapidated and seemingly abandoned, but are in fact cared for by the families who live there—and who open their doors to us in exchange for a few words or a few pounds. With no names or markers on the map, the labyrinthine paths are made not only of stone and tombstones, but also of people, who celebrate our presence, pose for a portrait, and point us toward the entrance to their courtyards where graves bloom.
And because the sprawling city of Cairo continues to grow, the City of the Dead is currently undergoing significant changes due to government infrastructure projects aimed at expanding the urban landscape. Over the past two years, parts of the ancient cemetery have been demolished to make way for new highways and overpasses, raising concerns among conservationists, families of the deceased, and local residents—not to mention UNESCO itself. “It’s reaching our area too,” laments Agnieszka Dobrowolska. “The government has the power to do it, and it does. We, the people who live for heritage, don’t like it.” All that remains for them is to carry on living among the dead, trying to stave off the inevitable. “It will take a long time, but we see that people change and that communities change. I hope that the change we’re bringing about will stay with them for a long time.”
Once again, the call to prayer echoes from the top of the minaret through the loudspeakers; very few people climb its spiral staircase. Slowly, its shadow sweeps across the city like a clock.
