I had never expected to learn of the demolition of the tomb of my mother and that of at least eight generations of ancestors via Twitter. But one night last winter, I came upon a photograph of my mother’s grave in a tweet that was tagged #SaveEgyptsHeritage. I scrambled to look for more information online, but to no avail. It was late in Cairo, and the calls I made to my father went unanswered. I couldn’t sleep that night. The next day, I learned that the entire historic necropolis of Cairo where my family lay would be razed to make way for a highway.
My mother’s tomb – built in 1924 by an Italian convert to Islam named Mario Rossi – lies in a vast necropolis commonly known as the City of the Dead. Dating back to at least the seventh century AD, it has been described as the oldest Muslim cemetery in the world, and the longest in continuous use – and it occupies a vast space in Cairo that is symbolic as well as physical. It is home to dead caliphs and kings, rogues and revolutionaries, celebrities and saints. It also houses the remains of many people whose lives were deemed too unimportant to be remembered: eunuchs and household slaves who were laid to rest alongside the remains of those who had bought and sold them.
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Death, the Koran reminds us, is the great equaliser, yet here its commonness is disguised by a dizzying array of architectural idioms: from the 12th-century stalactite dome of the Imam al-Shafi’i, one of the most significant Muslim jurists in history, to the early 20th-century Neo-Mamluk turrets built by European converts, including the one in which my family is buried. Some have ornately stencilled or painted walls that are made to look like wallpaper, whereas others have stained-glass windows that poetically illustrate the names of the dead. Many had Bohemian-crystal chandeliers and the kinds of Ushak rugs favoured by the Ottoman elites of the mid-19th century.
Despite the diversity of exteriors, the interiors are, at least in structure, fairly similar: they feel like the courtyard houses common across the Muslim world, from Iran to Morocco. But instead of the usual living spaces, these are inhabited by marmoreal monuments that must have conveyed a deep sense of permanence in an age before armoured military-grade bulldozers were imaginable. One minor prince was given a monument in the shape of the train that allegedly killed him, while a princess was buried underneath a white Carrara bed (she was married five times and had many lovers). A great-aunt of mine who died of a brain tumour shortly after her wedding was buried beneath the bridal canopy under which she had been processed a few days before. The most arresting monuments were created by parents grieving the loss of a child, such as the black-and-white ablaq (or piebald) domed room built by the lesbian mystic poet and princess Jamila Fazila to commemorate her three-year-old son.
Some marble inscriptions recorded the exact moment of death (to the very second), while others conveyed in Ottoman or Persian genealogical facts about the deceased person’s place of birth or country of origin. Many resting places are inscribed with what is known as the secret language of numbers, a complex and cryptic code intended to convey details about the dead in case the tombs were defaced. As it turns out, the ancestors, as always, were prophetic.
But what makes the City of the Dead a real city and not just a symbolic one is that it houses a vast population (some estimates put it at several million) of living people. Among the rooms that housed the marble monuments to the dead and the rooms in which grieving families brought irises, read the Koran and made offerings of shurayq bread, there is provision for the families of caretakers. As many have been there for generations as have been buried in the ground above which they reside. They live rent-free (often with no electricity or running water) in return for looking after the dead and their ornate surroundings. With the demographic explosion of Cairo as a city, burial space too came at a premium, and tombs were often resold when caretakers wanted to make some extra income on the side. However, by the late 1990s, when many Egyptians started rediscovering their Ottoman heritage, the chandeliers began to be stolen, as did sections of carved marble – some of which ended up in upmarket Cairene homes; some in the hands of European antique dealers.
When I arrived in Cairo in summer 2022 to document the imperilled site, a significant campaign had taken root against the planned demolitions. Its leading lights were the architectural and urban historian Dr Galila el Kadi and Dr Mustafa al-Sadiq, a gynaecologist whose professional expertise in birth was matched only by his unrelenting devotion to the dead. They were accompanied by a number of professional conservationists, as well as by amateur photographers.
In spite of this, however, the bulldozers were sent in earlier this year. The demolitions have sparked outrage, leading to acts of heroic resistance in a very unforgiving political climate: five members of the fig-leaf committee charged with the preservation of the necropolis resigned in protest; hundreds of fine-arts students marched to the City of the Dead in August, defying government orders. The state has responded by surrounding the area with military police, padlocking the mausoleums and forbidding visitors and photography. A media blackout has been enforced. Every morning I wake up fearing the worst. It is only a matter of time.
When my own mother died, I consoled myself with the thought that her remains had been laid somewhere exceedingly beautiful. When I left Egypt at the age of 17, I believed that, wherever I ended up, my body would eventually be brought back to lie beside hers. The decimation of the City of the Dead represents the erasure of the last vestiges of my family’s imprint on the land they have called home since the eighth century. It also signifies the loss of Cairo’s only remaining large public space and its best-preserved collection of Medieval architecture. If the effect of this act of unprecedented vandalism is to momentarily silence the collective, as we take in the enormity of what is being lost, it may yet unite the fractured elements of a broken nation.
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