City of the Dead

About City of the Dead

Cemetery in Egypt

The City of the Dead, or al-Qarafa, is a series of vast Islamic-era necropolises stretching north and south of the Cairo Citadel, below the Mokattam Hills and outside the old city walls, over a length of roughly four miles (6.4 km). It forms part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Historic Cairo. The name comes from the Banu Qarafa, a clan of the Ma'afir tribe who settled here in the early Islamic period; medieval Cairo knew two qarafas, the Greater east of Fustat, where Muslims had been buried since the conquest, and the Lesser at the foot of Mokattam, which holds the tomb of Imam al-Shafi'i. Today the area is divided into the Northern (or Eastern) Cemetery north of the Citadel and the older Southern Cemetery to its south, with a smaller cemetery north of Bab al-Nasr. It grew with the city of Fustat from 642 CE and reached its height of prestige and monumentality under the Mamluks in the 13th to 15th centuries, so the graves of ordinary Cairenes lie alongside the grand funerary complexes of sultans and emirs: the mausoleum of Sultan Qaytbay and the complex of Sultan Barquq in the Northern Cemetery, and the dome of Imam al-Shafi'i and the tombs of the Muhammad Ali family in the Southern. The necropolis was never only for the dead. Over the centuries it housed gravediggers and tomb custodians, Sufis and scholars studying in the religious foundations built by sultans and wealthy patrons, and the people of small villages that grew up among the tombs; many families still live here today.

Where:

Cairo, Egypt