Unusual scenes were taking place at Cairo’s City of the Dead last week, with the major cemetery’s usual serenity being disturbed by the roar of bulldozers demolishing various walls as part of plans to widen roads for the construction of the Fardose axis, a new multi-lane highway linking the heart of Cairo to the surrounding ring road, New Cairo, and Nasr City.

The construction of the new axis has sparked outrage among some architects, antiquities lovers, and social-media users, who believe that during the demolition some Islamic mausoleums may have collapsed along with graves constructed between the 1930s and 1950s.

Cairo’s so-called City of the Dead consists of two separate cemeteries extending north and south of the Islamic City. The Northern Cemetery first began to be used by the nobles of Egypt’s Mameluke sultanate in the 1300s and 1400s, while the Southern Cemetery, known as Al-Qarafa, is even older and has been used since the 700s.

It also houses the graves built between the 1930s and 1950s of various Egyptian intellectuals who played important roles in the country’s modern history.

Soheir Hawass, a professor of architecture and urban design at the Faculty of Engineering in Cairo, said that this area of the City of the Dead was part of the Historic Cairo World Heritage Site registered on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1979. It is also registered as a protected zone in accordance with Law 119/2008.

The area features many graves whose architectural styles have a "significant historical value" under a 2006 law. Some of these graves belong to influential figures in the history of modern Egypt, including former prime minister Hassan Sabri, whose name has also been used for a street in Cairo, Ahmed Aboud Pasha, the first Egyptian to join the Suez Canal Authority’s board of directors, and Ahmed Lotfi Al-Sayed, one of the most influential scholars in the history of Egypt and the first dean of Cairo University.

There is also the grave of princess Nazli Halim, granddaughter of Mohamed Ali Pasha, the founder of modern Egypt. Archaeologist Youssef Osama has argued strongly that these burial places should be signalled to visitors along the lines of the “Here Lived” project that indicates the former residences of influential figures by placing plaques on their walls.

Hawass said that the images and locations of the graves were documented on GIS maps of the area, and the Cairo governorate had been asked to review the locations before any decision to move them was made. She said that a few years ago a similar highway project had been proposed, but the National Organisation for Urban Harmony, the body concerned with heritage decisions, had stopped it. Hawass had represented the Organisation during meetings to discuss the matter.

“It goes against the identity of the area, as the cemeteries have been an integral part of the history of Cairo since its inception,” said May Al-Ibrashi, a conservation architect and founder of the architectural consultancy Mugawara, who has worked extensively in the Southern Cemetery.

“The City of the Dead includes funerary complexes and Sufi establishments that at one point were the only sources of education. That is why it is easy to find Islamic scholars listed in the obituaries of the 14th century with their last title Al-Qarafa, another name for the historic cemeteries of Cairo,” she added.

Al-Ibrashi said that the graves of the 1920s and 1930s were “like rest houses where you could find a kitchen, a salon, and even a place for hired help. That aspect of the country’s intangible heritage reflects the liberal history of the Egyptians. This is where most of the elite of the time would bury their dead.”

“It’s a City of the Dead, but it is also living heritage. The continuity is very valuable,” said Dina Bakhoum, an art historian specialising in heritage conservation and management. “The urban fabric has remained in place for a very long time,” and “you still have the hustle and bustle that you read about” in the mediaeval texts.

Throughout history, people have lived in the cemeteries, and to this day people come regularly to sit at their loved ones’ graves. In Mameluke times, the sultans held sumptuous processions through the Northern Cemetery.

During holy feasts, lots of families still choose to start the Eid celebrations by visiting their loved ones. Visits to the cemeteries include distributing special baked items (shouriek and orass) to the area’s poor, as well as bringing flowers and other items. In modern times, whole communities have lived side by side with the dead in the tombs built to hold their remains.

“I have lived here for 41 years, and I married my husband here,” said 60-year-old Um Essam at a grave dating from the early 20th century. The mausoleum was intact, but bulldozers had levelled the compound walls and the rooms that were once her home. Her late husband’s family were the tomb’s guardians, and he was born and raised there. He is buried alongside the site’s owners in the mausoleum’s garden.

“We have a long connection to this place. People today don’t respect the living or the dead,” Um Essam said.

One grave owner who preferred to remain anonymous told Al-Ahram Weekly that the Cairo governorate has failed in its mission to protect the tombs. It had not informed the grave owners before the demolition deadline, giving them insufficient time to remove the remains of their deceased to another grave, he said.

“The governorate informed us only a week before the demolition, which was not enough time to buy another grave and remove our family’s remains. This led to the loss of the remains of our family for good beneath the debris,” the grave owner said.

“The thing about the cemeteries is that there are a lot of hidden gems that no one knows about,” Al-Ibrashi commented. “You find tombstones from the Ottoman period, for example. You find a shrine that looks modern but is actually a site mentioned in the ancient guidebooks.”

Bakhoum said the problem was that there were several government stakeholders and responsibility was dispersed and decisions made without adequate discussion. What was needed, she suggested, was greater consultation among all the stakeholders to find alternatives that allow development while preserving history.

“I think the real problem we have here is how do we define heritage, saying what is valuable and for whom,” she commented. The Cairo governorate and the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) meanwhile stressed that no registered monuments were harmed in the construction process.

“It is impossible that we would allow antiquities to be demolished,” Secretary-General of the SCA Mustafa Al-Waziri told the Weekly, asserting that both cemeteries had remained untouched by the road-building. Large Mameluke mortuary complexes create a skyline of domes and minarets over a landscape densely packed with graves and tombs from many eras, he noted, saying that any affected graves were modern ones from the 1920s and 1950s belonging to individuals whose families would be compensated.

Osama Talaat, head of the Islamic, Coptic, and Jewish antiquities sector at the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, described reports on social media and in some newspapers about the “destruction” of the Mameluke Al-Qarafa as "unfounded rumours" and that all the photographs published belonged to modern private graves not on Egypt’s Islamic Heritage List.

“Although they are not antiquities, an archaeological committee has been asked to check any fragment that has historical value to study it to see whether it should be placed in a museum. However, the committee did not find any such fragments among the areas affected,” Talaat said.

According to Mahmoud Nassar, head of the Central Development Authority, the Fardose axis is a national project to develop Cairo’s road network in order to reduce traffic congestion. It was vital to ease the traffic choking the city and link the surrounding regions to it, he added. 

He said the first phase of the road project was 86,000 metres long and between three to four lanes in each direction and would be built at a cost of LE1.2 billion. This phase was expected to be completed within six months, he said.

Work is now underway on Ibn Qonsowa Street and the crossroads at Salah Salem Street in parallel with the Fardose Bridge, with Nassar saying that all the historical monuments there were safe and sound. What had been demolished were only outer walls and some modern graves whose owners had been informed.

“Compensation in the form of an alternative burial place in another cemetery will be given to those who require the evacuation of graves after the road expansion,” he added. An external wall to enclose the graves and preserve the architectural character of the whole area will also be built.

*A version of this article appears in print in the 6 August, 2020 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly