Saturday 11 October 2008

At the "city of the deads"..



There is a group of vast cemeteries at Cairo that stretches out along the base of the Moqattam Hills
The cemeteries built in the City of the Dead, as it is called, are much different than the western idea of cemeteries.
This is because traditionally, Egyptians buried their dead in room-like “burial sites” so they could live in them during the long mourning period of forty days. .
Among these cemeteries lives a community of Egypt’s urban poor,
“More than five million Egyptian live in these cemeteries, and have formed their own enterprises,” said Malak Yakan, an anthropologist ..

As the great Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz, Nobel Prize of literature, wrote:
"The real malady is fear of life, not of death."

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