The housing crisis in a village of Dakahlia Governorate—northeast of Cairo— has not only affected the living residents, but also its dead ones.  As a result of the lack of space, up to four-storey concrete chambers are being used for burial spots instead of traditional underground graves.

“I want to gain livelihood, it’s not my fault!” said Ahmed Abdulazim, a gravedigger in Meit al-Kurama village, who tries to distance himself from the religious complexities of the matter. He does not, however, hesitate to express his opinion. “This is indeed an illegal burial procedure!”

The housing crisis in a village of Dakahlia Governorate—northeast of Cairo— has not only affected the living residents, but also its dead ones.  As a result of the lack of space, up to four-storey concrete chambers are being used for burial spots instead of traditional underground graves.

“I want to gain livelihood, it’s not my fault!” said Ahmed Abdulazim, a gravedigger in Meit al-Kurama village, who tries to distance himself from the religious complexities of the matter. He does not, however, hesitate to express his opinion. “This is indeed an illegal burial procedure!”

Abdulazim stands in the middle of a semi-residential area in the village adorned with yellow and green multi-storey houses with arched windows. But a closer look at that scene reveals a different picture.  The houses are actually graves and the windows are sealed with bricks since the entrances are small chambers that house dead bodies.

During the burial process, explains Abdulazim, three people carrying the coffin climb a large iron staircase to the second, third, or fourth floor, while he waits in front of the destined chamber. And, in implementation of the Ministry of Awqaf’s (MoA) recommendations, Adbulazim covers the previously buried bodies with sand and places the new corpses on top.

Land crisis or craze?

It is often said that the acute shortage of land has pushed villagers to invent this kind of burial, which is alien to Egyptian society, whose religious scholars insist that burial can only be under the ground.

The villagers, on the other hand, appear to have adopted a jurisprudential rule that ‘necessity makes forbidden things permissible’, especially since MoA has approved it. “As long as washing the dead body is lawfully carried out”, says the MoA undersecretary, “the body may be laid to rest in a safe and sealed place, and soil may be replaced by sand.”

Abdulazim, however, has a different opinion.  “There is no land shortage, and villagers are rich and can buy additional land for burial.  But they feel proud about having such high-level graveyards.”

Even though this claim might seem odd, a quick tour around the village supports it, at least partially. Wealth is definitely visible throughout the village. There are several large palaces and villas, as many of the village’s residents are expatriate workers in Europe. Multistoried graves are, therefore, palatial semblances of the lofty palaces built for the living.

A young man from Abu Jalals, who wished to remain anonymous, denies Abdulazim’s claim. “It is not true that we build multi-storey graveyards as a source of pride; there is really shortage of land allocated for burial.”

Even the dead have to take a number

Abdulazim found the claim of land shortage in a rural area bizarre. But not all land is suitable for a cemetery. An official permit must be obtained for allocating additional burial spaces, which has not happened since the establishment of the village cemetery in the middle of the last century.

Wafa Sandoubi, Deputy Director of the Dakahlia Housing Department, the competent authority for issuing such permits, said the problem was already being monitored and remedied in the forthcoming strategic plans.  In Egyptian bureaucratic terms, this could translate as the problem persisting indefinitely. Sandoubi, like many others, described the two-level graveyard buildings as ‘lawfully and legally banned’.