Day 11 Ms.Sarah In Egypt
Day 11–Cairo
Upon arrival back in Cairo, we visited The Citadel which served as home to Egypt’s rulers for 700 years. It was originally founded in 1176 by Salah ad-Din (Saladin). The Citadel is a very fortified complex and not all of it is open to the public. It serves as a museum of Islamic architecture and has four separate museums and several mosques. We toured the Mohammed Ali Mosque. Ali was Turkish and so there is a heavy Turkish architectural influence. I learned a few things about mosques in general:
All are square or rectangular in shape.
The four corners are for schools.
The direction of Mecca is clearly marked.
The center empty space is for purification.
Most Egyptians are Sunnis.
Next stop was Manshiyat Naser, or Garbage City. This is rather complicated to describe so I have copied a lot of information from an on-line site. First, driving through this area, I did not get the impression that it was a city. It’s more like a long, narrow alley lined with bags and bags of trash. However, we did not drive into the entire 5.5 square miles of garbage that people are living in. These bags are picked up by trucks and taken to a processing plant, sorted, and recycled. Collecting garbage is a cottage industry and serves the purpose of cleaning Egypt which is full of garbage. The Coptic monastery we visited has a program which pays students to sort garbage in exchange for tuition.
This is one of the poorest neighbourhoods in Cairo. It is a place where the inhabitants are trying to create an economy out of the things that other people throw away.�Mansheyat Naser is a slum area and home to more than 262,000 of Egypt’s poorest inhabitants, mostly Coptic Christians. It is Cairo’s main destination for garbage collectors, the Zabbaleen, who bring Cairo’s rubbish there for people to start work on recycling it. The area has poor living conditions and rubbish almost everywhere, from over the streets to on the roofs of the houses. In addition, there is a lack of basic infrastructure such as sewers, electricity and water.
St Simon Monastery:
LARGE CHRISTIAN COMMUNITIES ARE NOT abundant in Muslim-dominated Egypt. One of the more populous groups is the garbage scavenging Zabbaleen, who have retained their Coptic beliefs and established the largest Christian church in the Middle East at the Monastery of Saint Simon.
The Zabbaleen (meaning literally “garbage collectors”) village at the base of the Mokattam cliffs began around 1969 when the Cairo governor decided to move all of the garbage collectors to a single settlement. The garbage collectors were largely Coptic Christians and as their numbers continued to grow over the years the need for a centralized church began to grow. In 1975, the first Christian church was built in the village but after a large fire broke out nearby, work began on a monastery that was built right into the cliffside.
The Monastery of Saint Simon was the result of this new project. Simon the Tanner was a craftsman saint who lived during the 10th century and the cave church that was dedicated to him seems as though it might last for 10 more. Using a pre-existing cave and the slope that led into it, the current monastery seats 2,000 people around a central pulpit. Other nearby caves have also been built into separate church spaces and all of them have been linked to create a massive Christian complex in the heart of garbage city.
Since tourism through the scavenger’s village is not a thriving industry, reaching the Monastery of Saint Simon is no small feat, yet as the largest Christian church within a handful of countries, hundreds of thousands of people make the pilgrimage each year.