Historic Cairo cemetery faces destruction from new highways – By Lee Keath and Samy Magdy (Associated Press) / Sept 11, 2023
Preservationists say highway construction by the Egyptian government threatens to destroy Cairo’s City of the Dead, a vast historic cemetery that has been in use for more than 1,000 years
CAIRO — The cane chairs and umbrella still stand in the courtyard of Hussein Omar’s family mausoleum, where his grandmother came every morning for 19 years after her daughter — his mother — died. Near her grave, she would sit and pray under the date palm and among the flowering plants, a few hours of peace in Cairo ’s historic City of the Dead.
Now the mausoleum, built in 1924 in a neo-Islamic style and housing the graves of a number of prominent Egyptians from a century ago, is threatened with demolition.
Authorities have already razed hundreds of tombs and mausoleums as they carry out plans to build a network of multilane highways through the City of the Dead, a vast cemetery that has been in use for more than a millennium. Stunned preservationists say the construction is destroying a unique part of Egypt’s heritage where major Islamic figures, prominent Egyptian politicians, artists and scholars and the loved ones of many Egyptians are buried.
