Egyptian mother of three Menna said she was caught off-guard when a bulldozer clearing space for a controversial highway flattened much of a mausoleum that doubled as her home in a sprawling cemetery.
“The earth mover suddenly hit the wall and we found ourselves throwing our things in a panic” outside, she said.
“They kicked us out on the street,” she said, surrounded by rubble and dust in the UNESCO-listed world heritage site.
Photo: AFP
Menna’s parents and grandparents had made their home among the graves of the City of the Dead, the oldest necropolis in the Muslim world.
For those unable to afford prohibitively high rents in Egypt’s capital, the burial chambers in the city’s Basatin District provide shelter for thousands like her.
Many built extensions to the original mausoleums, eking out a largely tranquil, if bizarre, existence side-by-side with dead sultans, singers and saints in the sprawling east Cairo cemetery.
However, Menna said her peace — and that of the dead — was shattered by the arrival of workers.
“It was awful. We moved the dead on straw mats,” she said.
She and her husband shifted several bodies, including the remains of her father, to a segment of her home still intact.
Menna is now living with neighbors in part of the cemetery that is not in the demolition area.
Dozens of bodies were displaced by the construction work in the second half of last month, according to local media, to make way for the 17.5km Al-Ferdaous (Paradise) highway.
Ferdaous, connecting major Cairo road arteries, is the latest installment of Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi’s urban vision. He is intent on transferring the center of political power to a new capital, about 45km east of Cairo — a megaproject in the desert overseen by the military’s engineering arm.
Al-Sisi led the army’s overthrow of elected Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi in 2013 following mass protests against the Islamist leader’s rule.
He won his first term as president in 2014 and was re-elected four years later with more than 97 percent of the vote.
It is not just residents of the City of the Dead who are upset by the demolition work undertaken there.
Galila El-Kadi, a veteran architect and urban researcher based in Marseille, France, said the site is “an important component” of the capital’s urban history.
A final resting place for illustrious figures, including singer Farid al-Atrash and writer Ihsan Abdel Kouddous, as well as ordinary Egyptians, the Islamic necropolis founded in the 7th century stretches more than 6.5km.
It is full of ornately designed domes with Koranic verses that have been the object of fascination for orientalist painters and historians.
El-Kadi, who authored a book on the City of the Dead, said the demolition had reached a historic perimeter where luminaries are buried, including Sultan Abu Said Qansuh of the Mamluk Dynasty in the 15th century.
She said the demolitions would result in a loss of Cairo’s “visual identity and its memory.”
They reveal the “blind and arbitrary” character of a haphazard urban planning vision, driven by a “bulldozer policy,” El-Kadi said.
UNESCO said that it was “neither informed nor consulted” about the demolition work.
“The World Heritage Centre is following up with the Egyptian authorities to review the matter and assess any potential impacts on the Outstanding Universal Value, authenticity and integrity of the property,” it added.
On social media, Egyptians have documented the urban destruction with photographs of their family vaults as well as historic ones.
The Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities defended the work undertaken in the cemetery last month and said “there was no destruction of monuments” as only “recent graves” were moved.
However, Menna said she is haunted by the disturbed bodies.
“They abuse the living and the dead, without mercy ... and in the end, no one cares about us,” she said.
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