city of the dead

My dear friend,

I’ve probably told you about the first funeral I ever attended, when my grandfather raised me up in his arms so that I could better see the body. “Touch his hand,” my grandfather said. “It’s not scary.” I obeyed. And although my grandfather loved me, and although he meant well, I suffered nightmares for weeks afterward. Even now, whenever I attend an open-casket funeral, I will inevitably dream that night of being buried alive.

The first time we came to Egypt, I waited outside the mummy room at the Egyptian Museum for C. to finish his visit. But I’ve gotten a little braver since then. I flinch less violently when I see roadkill. I’ve learned to stand in the back during funeral services. And so, when we toured the Hunting Lodge of the Manial Palace a couple weeks ago, I marched boldly through the rows of taxidermied animals even though they’d been so poorly preserved that their bodies were shriveled and their faces were peeling away from their bones.

I’m six thousand miles away from you, but even from this distance I can sense your irritation Then what on earth would compel you—isn’t that what you’d like to say to me right now?—to visit someplace called the City of the Dead?

Well, first of all, the only bodies on display in the City of the Dead are those that are still breathing, walking, eating, hawking. The other bodies—the ones that are entombed—have been here for so many centuries already that I find I’m not afraid of them.

Although the surrounding area was likely used as a burial ground as early as the 7th century, this site became famous for the mausoleums Mamluk rulers built here between the 14th and 16th centuries. The word “Mamluk” means “one who is owned,” as they were originally Turkic, Caucasian, and Eastern European slaves brought to Egypt to be trained as royal soldiers and palace guards. They served Islamic rulers in Egypt through several centuries and dynasties (the Umayyads out of Damascus, the Abbasids out of Baghdad, and the Fatimids from Tunisia) until they finally seized power for themselves in Cairo in 1250. Without any set rules of succession, Mamluk rulers generally relied on military force or assassinations to steal the throne from one another. Despite the infighting—or perhaps because of it?—the Mamluks accomplished a great deal. Between 1250 and 1516, they drove out European Crusaders from the Holy Land, expanded the empire, established control of key trade routes (spices, perfumes, silks), and—with the wealth that ensued—designed and built some of the most gorgeous architecture the city has ever seen. In 1516, the Mamluks were defeated by the Ottoman Turks, and Cairo was demoted from the status of a Mediterranean capital to a province ruled from Constantinople.

The mausoleum of Sultan al-Ahsraf Barsbey

The period between 1250 and 1516 can be divided into two eras: that of the Turkic Bahri (“River”) Mamluks, named for their location on the Nile, and that of the Circassian Burgi (“Tower”) Mamluks, named for their location near the Citadel. By the time the Burgi Mamluks rose to power, Cairo was a crowded city of close to 500,000. So the Mamluk sultans decided to build their mausoleums in what we call the Northern Cemetery—or, City of the Dead—outside of the urban center. Of course, in the centuries since, Cairo has sprawled so far beyond its original walls that it has completely swallowed up the cemetery. Almost every time C. and I ride across town, we pass the mosques and mausoleums of the City of the Dead.

Egypt, of course, is famous for its tombs. But what sets the City of the Dead apart from other burial places is the fact that this ancient cemetery is full of living people, too. They eat and sleep and raise their children here. They sweep away the sand. They run their clotheslines straight through all the ghosts.

The first residents of the necropolis were family members of the deceased who served as caretakers of the tombs. Some of the grander mausoleums are still watched over by these descendants, and in fact it was such a caretaker who let us into the first tomb we visited. An imposing, solid front gate opened into a courtyard with a well-tended garden and two high wooden houses for pigeons. Dogs lounged on the grass beside a motorbike, and an Italian mask was hung around a tree trunk. Crossing the courtyard felt a little like crossing a neighbor’s backyard to reach the garage. But at the back of the lot, we found ourselves facing a mausoleum instead. We climbed a set of stone stairs to discover a white marble bed that served as the headstone for a princess buried beneath it. To our right, an ornately carved, floor-to-ceiling window spilled light onto a polished stone sarcophagus. The caretaker leaned silently against a wall on the left side of the room, next to a pile of cardboard packaging for a television and a set of cooking ware. A few minutes later, he led us down the stairs and through the yard and closed the gate again behind us.

Since the Mamluk sultans tended to build mausoleums as part of larger religious complexes, other residents of the Northern Cemetery during their reign included Sufi scholars, students, and the vast network of workers required to staff and maintain madrasas (Islamic schools) and khanqahs (spiritual retreats). It seems likely that the City of the Dead at that time felt more like a scholarly suburb than it did a necropolis.

The Khanqah of Faraj ibn Barquq is one of the most famous and impressive of the Mamluk-era complexes, complete with a gorgeous courtyard, twin domes, twin minarets, and twin mausoleums. The silence and serenity inside the compound made us feel for a moment as though we’d traveled a great distance—across time, across space—from the commotion of twenty-first century Cairo.

The light-filled, airy prayer hall, once open to Sufi travelers and scholars, is still in use today. The carpet is even marked with symbols to encourage social distancing.

After we ambled through the courtyard and listened to a muezzin’s prayer echoing against the tiled domes of the mausoleums, we followed a guide through a winding stone stairwell to the top of one of the minarets.

From there we gazed out over the prayer hall toward the labyrinthine network of mingled homes and tombs.

In the second half of the twentieth century, Cairo’s rapid growth and urbanization resulted in a severe housing shortage. Modernization efforts led to demolition projects, displacing entire communities. Some families moved into the mausoleums, while others constructed unofficial apartment buildings between the tombs. These days, many of the neighborhoods in the City of the Dead have electricity, running water, post offices, shops, and schools.

Perhaps it should not have come as a surprise to us that the arts, too, are flourishing in this haunting, haunted, complicated place. We stopped to watch glassblowers at work, studied murals by resident painters, and admired the “undead crafts” created and sold in the shadow of Sultan Qaytbey’s funerary complex.

What I’m trying to tell you, I think, is that the City of the Dead is not an easy place to understand. Much like Cairo itself, the Northern Cemetery defies expectations, categories, and labels. It is simultaneously dead and alive, gilded and impoverished. It is beautiful, ethereal. It is also littered with trash.

As we crossed back into the city of the living from the City of the Dead, I found myself thinking about a short story I’d taught last week. In Drew McKutchen’s “Zombie Horror,” a city’s inability to comprehend and manage a population of the undead symbolizes our inability to comprehend and manage pressing issues of poverty, displacement, and homelessness. McKutchen’s story underscores the way in which we dehumanize those who are struggling, or those who are suffering, in order to keep ourselves distant from them. In the Northern Cemetery, the zombie metaphor becomes astoundingly relevant. By conceptualizing the neighborhoods here as cities of “the dead” instead of cities of “the dispossessed,” it becomes easier to ignore the ways in which our own desire for progress, for modernization, for space, for convenience have ravaged our most vulnerable communities.

If the City of the Dead emerged as a consequence of overcrowding in the Middle Ages, the same forces are threatening its very existence today. In 2020, the government demolished—evidently without much warning—some of the ancient structures and present-day residences in order to clear space for a highway designed to ease Cairo’s infamous congestion.

As it turns out, the most frightening element of the City of the Dead is not the ancient bodies. They, at least, have shared their space with those who needed shelter. No—much more terrifying is my own eagerness to return to my air-conditioned apartment building, where I can tell myself that I do not live at others’ expense. From that lovely balcony, there’s not a single crypt in sight.

Yours—L.