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Shopping in the City of the
Dead
Trent Rockwood
Had you asked me when I first moved to Egypt whether I’d ever
wear a shirt stolen from a dead person, I would have recoiled and
questioned your sanity. Or if you’d asked me the street price
for an Egyptian tortoise or Vervet monkey, I would have shrugged
in bewilderment. Then again, I never thought I’d ever be doing
most of my shopping in a cemetery, or bargaining for used clothing
and endangered animals.
Shortly after graduating from College,
I decided to move to Cairo Egypt to study Arabic as well as to spread
my wings and live abroad for a few years. However in the process,
I discovered a market and way of shopping that defined my experience
as a whole.
In the massive urban sprawl of Cairo,
there are five major cemeteries that were at one time located on
the outskirts of town. But because of the rapid expansion of Cairo
over the last few decades, these cemeteries have slowly become more
and more central, and due to housing shortages, overpopulation,
and the rising cost of living, have become home to over five million
of Egypt’s urban poor. They have migrated there in droves,
usually taking over in squatter fashion, grabbing the free real
estate before someone else can move in, and making the tombs of
the dead into residences for the living. These vast tracts of overcrowded
cemeteries that lie along Cairo’s Moqattam hills have become
known collectively as “the city of the dead”, a mysterious,
unknown, and foreboding place for both foreigners and Cairenes alike.
 As
one passes by the tombs made into houses, they see children dressed
in the most threadbare of clothing standing in the doorways and
playing in the garbage strewn streets, and notice the creative use
of cement coffins inside the tombs as everything from ironing boards
to dinner tables, and from benches to beds. Laundry lines crisscross
the yard, strung up between gravestones, and television antennas
are propped up on the low, flat roofs.
Although some of the earlier residents
have illegally spliced wires from nearby mosques and run electric
wires to their tombs, most residents do not have the luxury of lights,
TV’s or telephones. And since people living in the tombs are
technically illegal squatters by Egyptian law, there is also no
sewer or trash service, and piles of garbage adorn every street
corner, while some alleys run with raw sewage. The chief source
of income for these people is a large market that occurs every Friday
morning, open to all who have something to sell, with no vendor
fees or laws to regulate what is sold.
Shopping in the “suq al guma’a”
or “Friday Market” in Cairo’s city of the dead
is an event that draws tens of thousands of Cairo’s poorest
every week to a place where they can both buy and sell almost any
kind of junk, trinket, or treasure, at a price that they can all
afford. It also occasionally draws one or two western-weary, slightly
adventurous, financially struggling Arabic students, one of whom
is myself. It is a place that even on my meager student’s
stipend, I could feel like a king for a day.
As I jump off the minibus, which
slows down only slightly to allow the frantic passengers to simultaneously
jump on and off, I find myself at the front entrance of the infamous
Friday market - a large unpaved street that winds for about a mile
through the tombs of the now inner-city graveyard. I am at once
hit by smells, sounds and images that are almost overpowering -
a motorcycle stacked with dozens of camel legs sits beside huge
buckets filled with goat, donkey, and sheep entrails. Large pails
of cow liver and raw fat sit in the sun, women and men with blood
up to their elbows yell back and forth bargaining with potential
buyers over the din of the crowd.
“Liver! Stomach! Intestines!”
a black-clad woman shouts as she pushes her way through the crowd,
carrying a dirty plastic bucket atop her head swarming with flies.
 The
mass of people is so thick that I am herded into one direction or
another almost against my will, and have to step between vendors
to get my bearings. This is survival shopping at it’s best,
just as it’s been in this part of the world for thousands
of years. Success at finding a good deal here depends solely on
ones aggressiveness, bargaining capability, and craftiness, as opposed
to your credit limit, as it is back in my hometown of Washington
DC. It’s also a refreshing lesson in honesty, as both the
seller and I can be completely honest about our intent to fleece
the other for all he’s worth.
I pause by the merchants who have
spread out their small blankets in front of them to display wares
they have picked up out of the garbage or stolen off the streets
during the past week – piles of broken kids toys, smashed
remote controls, old Tupperware lids, coils of wire, pieces of a
computer, here and there an old watch, a magazine - all for a price
that even the poorest of the poor can afford. Most of the merchandise
it is actual bona-fide junk, such as innards of long-outdated typewriters,
dented hubcaps, old bed springs, a piece of twine, a broken phone
receiver, etc, that they are hoping someone, somewhere has a use
for. The vendors start their prices out by sizing you up visually;
if you are well dressed and look like you have money the price starts
high.
“Does this work” I ask,
pointing to an old VCR with a smashed display panel. “Yes,
it works” the man says, brushing the dust off of it with his
sleeve. “Can I test it?” I ask. He looks around at the
mud and cement walls along the street and shrugs. I forget that
there are no electricity outlets for miles around here.
“I’ll take that alarm
clock there for 1 guinea” I say
“Are you kidding” He laughs, “its worth more than
four!”
“Two guineas” I say
“By God, I wouldn’t sell it to my own mother for that!”
I wave my hand and feign walking away.
“Wait!” He says, “May God curse you, take it for
three” and shoves it in my hands. “I can buy a new one
for only three and a half!” I counter, and we continue thus
until a price acceptable to both of us is finally agreed upon, and
we both part grinning to ourselves at our shrewdness - never has
shopping been so exiting.
I move on to the used clothing sellers
who heap their merchandise into large mountains of clothes on top
of plastic tarps, with crowds of people digging through them indiscriminately,
holding up blouses, underwear, pants, ties, shorts, and socks, yelling
out an offer, and then throwing them back to keep on searching.
As I sit ruffling through the mound of clothing a man passing by
leans over and says in a low voice,
“Don’t touch those clothes, they’re from the dead.”
I look at him in disbelief. “They take them off their bodies
before they are even cold” he continues. Judging from the
smell of them, I suspect he’s probably right.
“Why should that stop you?” a nearby woman says laughing
“They don’t need them anymore!”
I had learned from an Egyptian friend
that a some of these clothes come from charitable organizations
in the west, whose shipments are frequently sold by the ‘charitable
organizations’ to second parties, who in turn sell them to
third parties on the streets. However other sources of clothes are
more dubious. More than one person told me to wash the clothes I
bought at the Friday market at least three times.
“When someone dies in Cairo”
my friend told me. “They do not sit in the grave clothed for
very long.” “Some,” he continued, “are even
taken before they get to the grave” He explained how sometimes
the doorman of an apartment building will often inform his cohorts
when a building tenant has died, and before the grieving family
has a chance to discover the tragedy, they rush the apartment taking
all of the belongings, from the china in the cupboards to the clothes
on the corpse.
Despite the warning, I find a great
fleece button-up shirt that doesn’t smell too awful, and haggle
it down from two dollars to fifty cents, but finally have to throw
in another five cents for a plastic bag to carry it in.
 Up
the street I pass a row of shoe sellers, wondering what one would
do with an unmatched single shoe. “This one almost matches”
The vendor tells me, holding up another single shoe, “They
are both black”. “Yes, but they are different styles”
I say. “Then let me make you a deal,” He says. “You
get one shoe for half price”
I can hear and smell the live animal
market before I reach it. Here you can find for sale every kind
of animal species that survives the trip up from Sudan and Eastern
Africa. Monkeys, hawks, badgers, weasels, parrots, fish, etc, all
packed dozens to a cage. I see a large wire container filled five
feet high with desert tortoises, the ones on the bottom clearly
being crushed. Most of the animals in the market look to be near
death, which doesn’t seem to bother the crowds of kids who
are poking at them with sticks and throwing rocks and cigarettes
into their cages. I ask how much the desert falcon is, and the seller
won’t go down below eighty guineas. “What do you feed
him?” I ask. “Anything, bugs, meat, fish, fruit.”
He says. I didn’t know hawks ate fruit, I say to him, but
he is already busy fighting children away from the poisonous snakes
with a stick.
Just around the corner is a taxidermist
who apparently has a relationship with the animal seller and offers
ferocious looking stuffed versions of the same animals for sale.
They look diabolically creepy, fitted with cheap glass eyes taken
from children’s dolls, and then given an evil grin with bared
teeth or open beak, sometimes with fake blood painted around the
mouth. There’s nothing quite as unsettling, I found, as a
goose fitted with bloody fangs.
I veer off a side street into the
coin sellers’ alley, and start the long and time-consuming
process of sifting through bowls or socks of old coins. These are
sometimes the most interesting and educated of the vendors, having
gleamed a smattering of world history through the collection of
their coins and bills, and as I make small talk over what I am missing
from my King Farouq coin collection, the inevitable question is
posed, “Do you want to see the old coins?” one of them
will ask.
What he means by ‘the old coins’ are the Ottoman, Byzantine,
Greek, and Roman coins that are illegally pilfered from archeological
sites.
“What do you have today?” I ask. A vendor pulls out
a leather pouch from his breast pocket, and looking left and right
to make sure no undercover policeman might be watching, pours out
about a handful of silver and bronze Roman and Greek coins.
I learned the hard way that every
coin vendor has both real antique coins and fake ones, and if you
don’t learn to differentiate the two early on, you’re
liable to buy a complete set of melted down copper wire. He tells
me that special requests, such as a coin from the Ptolemaic, or
Fatamid period, can be fulfilled in less than a day, and, if I have
the money, he can offer me more than just coins. But since the trafficking
in illegal artifacts carries a jail sentence in Egypt, I politely
decline . I wander past the appliances section of the market and
recognize old house appliances that I haven’t seen since I
was a young child, an old Fridgedair, bathroom sinks with bronze
claws, hand powered washing machines, coal heated irons, mantle’s
and awnings taken from abandoned 18th century churches and mansions,
dusty chandeliers with two or three crystals hanging from them.
Next to these are rows of old and new bikes and motorcycles, some
of them with a chain and lock still around the back wheel. “Do
you have the key to the locks?” I ask “No, but it is
very cheap to cut, you can go to any mechanic’s shop”
the seller says. As they say in Cairo – What you lose on Thursday,
you can find on Friday at the market.
I pass by piles of aging military
equipment, gas masks, empty mortar shells, cracked range scopes
for canons and outdated nautical equipment. There are printing presses
next to old couches, a rowing machine, piles of cracked records,
empty bottles, stacks of ancient postcards, knives, stuffed teddy
bears, a saddle for a camel.
 The
new highway, which was built so that wealthier Cairenes could drive
over the cemetery rather than through it, signals the far end of
the market and creates the much coveted under-the-bridge real-estate
that houses some of the more established vendors such as the antiques
dealers, the electronics repairmen, the ‘forbidden’
movie sellers, and one of the oddest markets I’ve ever been
to in my life, the dog mating market.
Sectioned off in one small area
under the bridge, groups of men and boys bring their dogs of all
types and sizes to bargain with one another for the price of a mating.
The more handsome and healthy the dog is the higher the price he
fetches. Once the amount is agreed upon, the men form a small circle
around the two dogs and watch the ensuing process with almost analytical
scrutiny, hands on their chins, nodding their heads in approval
at the end of the transaction. I shoulder my way into one of the
circles, to see if this is really what it appears to be and make
a quick retreat – not finding the spectacle as exiting as
the others seem to.
Others sellers wander around with
puppies, the results of previous mating sessions, and let buyers
feel the dogs teeth, muscles, and skin before the starting to bargain.
Most of these dogs go to southern Egypt to be guard dogs for farmers,
and many men have made a one or two day trip for the chance of mating
their dog with the stock of Cairo’s finest.
The market begins to thin out at
this point, and I look down at my shoes and hands covered with the
fine gray dirt of the cemetery and I smell the burning plastic and
garbage odor that permeates my clothes and hair. I head for the
bus stop, and as the children that have been following and pestering
me for the last three hours start to lose interest and wander away,
I can finally take stock of my finds for this Friday. One shirt,
probably taken from a dead person, two Mameluke coins, possibly
stolen from an archeological dig, and an alarm clock that was most
likely taken from the garbage - all for just under three dollars.
But the experience of shopping among the dead is almost priceless.
The Friday Market occurs every Friday from 8 AM until about 2 PM,
under the Muqattam Hills. It can be reached on foot or taxi from
the Citadel. Ask for the “suu’ al guma’a”
or you can go by minibus from ma’aadi. Do not bring a lot
of money, and do not dress flashy.
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