By Phil Roberts, 9-5-2024
When we first went to Cairo in the early 2000s, very poor people lived and worked in the city’s two main cemeteries. Many of the poor people, otherwise homeless, were hired as “guards” to protect graves from looters. The family plots were three-walled and roofless, often with a wrought iron gate for the fourth wall. The rich families of those occupying the graves would visit once each month and bring food or cash to pay for the month’s grave protection. The family and the “guards” sometimes would share a picnic on the gravesite. On Fridays, thousands of people (even curious visitors like me) would gather along the railroad tracks, southwest of the Southern Cemetery for “Souk Gomaa,” or “Friday market.” It resembled a flea market with food carts! Total pandemonium! The chaos and noise was punctuated by train whistles blowing, engines whirring, and brakes screaming, car horns honking, and screams in Arabic, warning people to get their trinkets off the tracks before getting nudged (or worse) by a passing locomotive. Add to that the racket and smells of the entire northern section of the souk–animal cages, chickens, monkeys, goats, cats–all on the market. The smells varied by the foot as you walked along. You had to be careful not to be crushed, jostled, shoved by the throng. Occasionally, one could find a rare treasure, like a door handle once used to open the door of a grand French-built villa or British flat in the days of foreign occupation. (We have several such pieces we bought at Souk Gomma). Immediately below the Citadel and Mosque of Muhammad Ali, atop the Moqqattam Hills, southeast of the city, that neighborhood had no “street people.” If one needed a job, there were always more graves being “built” and filled up, where one could be hired on as a caretaker–perhaps beginning a long career there. (Oddly, there were few, if any, “trespassers,” living on graves where they were not authorized. (I did see a memorable “squatters tent” in my travels–fittingly, on the grave of Scottish economist Adam Smith –“Wealth of Nations”– in Edinburgh. A perfect metaphor for laissez-faire capitalism, I was too surprised to get a picture before the squatters gathered everything up and fled!) Pictured here, far below, is Cairo’s Southern Cemetery (left) and the bit more upscale “Northern Cemetery” (right). The second photo shows our friend and driver Hasan, and brother David surveying the scene, c. 2001.
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