![]() It is the apogee of a remodelled Cairo that already rings the city as it expands into compounds, villas and entire new neighbourhoods, linked via new highways, that increasingly house Cairo’s large middle-class population. A gigantic Astroturfed district with artificial lakes, technology hubs and Africa’s tallest building, the new capital’s design ethos draws on Egypt’s pharaonic past, featuring a crystal pyramid and motifs inspired by ancient Egyptian gods. Most notable among these projects is a new administrative capital to the east of the city, the site of a presidential palace, government buildings and residences, to which the major functions of the Egyptian state and diplomatic community are to be decamped. It is a face-off that symbolises the challenges of a wider city that in recent times has seen a hectic construction of a “new Cairo”. “The Egyptian state has always wanted to control histories,” he says, but in more recent times, there has been what appears to be a “deliberate targeting” in which “the attempts to erase history are part and parcel of attempts to overwrite people’s claims to property rights over what are clearly historic plots of valuable real estate”.Īn 83-year-old resident of Cairo’s City of the Dead, who hopes his house will not be demolished. He tells me that for years his family has been in deadlock with the state over what rights they have to visit, but that has now escalated, as the graves themselves have come under threat of removal. Hussein Omar’s mother, as well as some eight generations of his family, are buried there, and he hoped one day to lie next to them. In the years since, the threat of further demolition has hung over the rest of the city. In 2020, authorities began demolishing parts of the city to make way for an expressway. Buried there are not just ancient kings and dignitaries but more contemporary politicians, celebrities and Cairenes who passed in recent decades. Billboards, construction and heavy traffic rub shoulders with the silent tombs of intricate mosaics, ancient wooden doors and hallowed spaces of mourning and remembrance. It dates back to the seventh century, and, like so much of historic Cairo, has always existed in an almost dizzying proximity with modernity. Also known as the City of the Dead, it is very much alive with memories of those buried there, with the different eras of history that it traces, and with the real families who live in it and have done so, in some instances, for generations. Spread over an area almost 7km (4 miles) long, Cairo’s Necropolis is a sprawling district of tombs, mausoleums, mosques and courtyards.
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