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Burying the Dead, Identifying the Living: Foreign Communal Cemeteries in Late 19th Century Alexandria, Egypt
Abstract
Late nineteenth century Alexandria, Egypt, teemed with a multiplicity of nationalities, religions, and ethnicities in its everyday life. Naturally, it also overflowed with these peoples upon their deaths, and, consequently, in the city’s cemeteries. This paper explores the cemeteries of the foreign communities of nineteenth-century Alexandria. I use government correspondence and communal petitions from both the Egyptian and British National Archives to explore these cemeteries as socio-spatial markers of belonging. I argue that these cemeteries, in providing space for the dead, created a local, physical place for the living populations. As such, a private communal cemetery signified acceptance within the boundaries of the human population of the city. I focus specifically on three communal cemetery requests. The Free Thinkers asked to be recognized as the first civil community in 1873. For the next many years, they worked with the Egyptian government for land, uniting with the Greek Catholics and Greek Orthodox under the rubric of “European” for negotiations. The Maronites, buried with the Latin Catholics, petitioned for separate space. And the Armenians argued that burying their spillover dead in the Latin cemetery was the equivalent of a “foreign” burial, and that they, too, should be granted more land. In each case, the dead were buried in another community’s private cemetery. The requests, therefore, were not related to public health issues surrounding the disposal of dead bodies but to the symbolic and emotive value of a separate cemetery. As such, I contend that the cemetery negotiations were a means by which communities asserted their belonging within the larger city. They were negotiations of Alexandrianness. Cemeteries, by law, were placed on the outskirts of Alexandria. As the city grew, the cemeteries were engulfed within its margins and moved again. The constant give and take of land and borders replicates the back and forth of the human boundaries of the population. Cemeteries literally cemented foreign bodies to the city; to do so in a private, communal space connected the community’s living population to Alexandria as well. In so doing, the process helped identify and define the foreign communities as local Alexandrians.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Egypt
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries