I had never expected to learn of the demolition of the tomb of my mother and that of at least eight generations of ancestors via Twitter. I scrambled to look for more information online, but to no avail.
It was late in Cairo , and the calls I made to my father went unanswered. The next day, I learned that the entire historic necropolis of Cairo where my family lay would be razed to make way for a highway. Dating back to at least the seventh century AD, it has been described as the oldest Muslim cemetery in the world, and the longest in continuous use β and it occupies a vast space in Cairo that is symbolic as well as physical.
It is home to dead caliphs and kings, rogues and revolutionaries, celebrities and saints. It also houses the remains of many people whose lives were deemed too unimportant to be remembered: eunuchs and household slaves who were laid to rest alongside the remains of those who had bought and sold them. The gilded reliefs of the Daramalli monument were carved in honour of an aristocratic family from Drama in Greece, which intermarried with both the Egyptian and Ottoman ruling dynasties.
Some have ornately stencilled or painted walls that are made to look like wallpaper, whereas others have stained-glass windows that poetically illustrate the names of the dead. Many had Bohemian-crystal chandeliers and the kinds of Ushak rugs favoured by the Ottoman elites of the midth century. Despite the diversity of exteriors, the interiors are, at least in structure, fairly similar: they feel like the courtyard houses common across the Muslim world , from Iran to Morocco.
But instead of the usual living spaces, these are inhabited by marmoreal monuments that must have conveyed a deep sense of permanence in an age before armoured military-grade bulldozers were imaginable. One minor prince was given a monument in the shape of the train that allegedly killed him, while a princess was buried underneath a white Carrara bed she was married five times and had many lovers.
