2023-06-20 00:07:32
Thousands of tombs in Cairo’s sprawling ancient cemetery are under threat from a recent project to widen roads and build bridges to ease congestion in Cairo, causing protests among conservationists and families of the dead buried there.
Since Islam entered Egypt in the seventh century AD, the cemetery, which is located on the eastern edge of historic Cairo, has become a resting place for the deceased.
The area – known as the City of the Dead and listed by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as a world heritage site – extends over an area of ten square kilometers and many prominent families in Cairo still bury their dead in cemeteries that already contain the remains of their fathers and grandfathers.
“The cemetery where we are standing is where my mother and grandmother are buried,” said Hisham Qassem, a political activist and former publisher, and a number of other family members.
He added that he had been told a few days before that he was preparing to move the bodies to another place called Roubiki and that he would be informed three or four days in advance.
After the issue was raised on social media, President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi last week ordered the formation of a committee to assess the situation and study available alternatives.
The government says it has no plans to destroy cemeteries classified as historic. But preservationists say that only 102 of the region’s more than 2.5 million tombs have this designation.
UNESCO says the area must be preserved. The organization will study the case in September 2023.
Unique architecture
Specialists say that the tombs are mostly built around private courtyards, and they were built throughout Islamic history in different styles, and that many of them are unparalleled in Egypt. Many of them contain marble, wood and metal carvings.
These tombs include the tombs of politicians from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including the leader Ahmed Orabi, and the magnificent mausoleums of the Mamluk sultans who ruled Egypt between 1250 and 1517.
It also includes the tomb of Imam al-Shafi’i, one of the four imams of the year who died in 820 AD.
Moaz Lafi, an academic researcher in Islamic antiquities and a specialist in the philosophy of architecture, says that the region has become a cemetery since Amr ibn al-Aas entered Egypt in 640 AD, and he fears that much of this long history will be lost now.
“I imagine that in five years we won’t find anything except maybe 20 percent of the City of the Dead as we know it,” he said.
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