City of the Dead, Cairo

City of the dead. Actually, Egyptians never call the sprawling cemetery at the eastern edge of Cairo 'City of the Dead.' Only Westerners do. Cairenes prefer to call it simply the arafa, the cemetery, and it is as much a part of the topography here as glass and steel skyscrapers are in Hong Kong.
But what better name than City of the Dead to describe the four-mile-long walled necropolis that now houses thousands of families and countless small businesses? Video stores, car repair shops and tile factories line the main arteries of the cemetery,
and cramped buses deliver hoards of commuters
at the end of each work day. Furniture makers ply their craft inside tombs and streams of uniformed children parade to and from school, stopping for a quick soccer game between the cenotaphs.

The arafa is a necropolis turned metropolis,
where the needs of the living have far outpaced
the sanctity of the dead.
Here, survival takes precedence over superstition,
and the impact of overpopulation and overcrowding
wears a human face.

The cemetery is filled with refugees from Cairo's housing shortage who became homesteaders in a landscape of tombs and mausoleums. Today, some 50,000 people live in tombs while between 500,000 and a million more are cramped into tenement houses where tombs once stood. These people staked their claim in the cemetery when no place else could absorb them, and
subsequently they came to prefer the silent company
of the dead to the harsh conditions of urban living.
Many claim they wouldn't leave even if they had the chance.

Today, tombs that were designed to house a single family teem with bare-bottomed children, chickens and goats. Soccer balls fly where the relatives of the deceased used to pay their respects every week, and
tattered laundry floats between the cenotaphs,
obscuring the names and prayers engraved on weather beaten surfaces. Where horse-drawn carriages used to deliver weekly visitors, sooty buses honk their way down paved roads, and on a once contemplative lane between the tombs, a Friday junk market overflows with the refuse of modern society looking to be reborn.