Garbage City

Manshiyat Nasser, or as it is more popularly known, Garbage City,“ is a slum settlement on the outskirts of the Moqattam Hills, within Cairo’s sprawling metropolitan area.

Egypt is a Muslim-majority country, but the Zabbaleen are Coptic Christians, at least, 90 percent of them are christian, Christian communities are rare to find in Egypt, so the Zabbaleen prefer to stay in Mokattam within their own religious community even though many of them could afford houses elsewhere.

The Zabbaleen are descendants of farmers who started migrating from Upper Egypt to Cairo in the 1940s. Fleeing poor harvests and poverty they came to the city looking for work and set-up makeshift settlements around the city. Initially, they stuck to their tradition of raising pigs, goats, chickens and other animals, but eventually found collecting and sorting of waste produced by the city residents more profitable.

There are seven beautiful cave churches unexpectedly rise against the backdrop of Mokattam hills. Located in southeast Cairo, these Coptic Christian churches were created by the Zabbaleen, a community of garbage collectors who make their living collecting and recycling garbge.

The largest and most famous was established in 1975. After the establishment of the church, the Zabbaleen felt more secure in their location and only then began to use more permanent building materials, such as stone and bricks, for their homes. Given their previous experience of eviction from Giza in 1970, the Zabbaleen had lived in temporary tin huts up till that point. In 1976, a large fire broke out in Manshiyat Nasir, which led to the beginning of the construction of the first church below the Mokattam mountain on a site of 1,000 square meters. Several more churches have been built into the caves found in Mokattam, of which the Monastery of St. Simon the Tanner is the largest with a seating capacity of 20,000. In fact, the Cave Church of St. Simon in Mokattam is the largest church in the Middle East.