The City of the Dead is the northern cemetery of Islamic Cairo where a community of the living coexists among the dead. As soon as I arrived in the “city,” a young man started to show me around the streets. I only knew the extreme basics in Arabic, “Hello, thank you, my name is,” and he knew about the equivalent in English, but through gestures, we managed to communicate and I spent a couple of hours with him as he showed me around his neighborhood.

Photo and text by Karna Kurata, Karna Kurata Photography.