If you take a city such as Salonika or Smyrna, you will find there five or six communities each of which has its own memories and which have almost nothing in common. Yet the essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common; and also that they have forgotten many things. No French citizen knows whether he is a Burgundian, an Alan, a Taifale, or a Visigoth, yet every French citizen has to have forgotten the massacre of Saint Bartholomew,’ or the massacres that took place in the Midi in the thirteenth century. There are not ten families in France that can supply proof of their Frankish origin, and any such proof would anyway be essentially flawed, as a consequence of countless unknown alliances, which are liable to disrupt any genealogical system.(1)
Ernest Renan, lecture given at the Sorbonne, 1882.
This is an idea inspired by a comment about Cairo’s City of the Dead as a place where the spiritual goal is to celebrate the absence of judgment, which is to be left for God(2) and in many other people’s case in God’s absence. The City of the Dead reveals more than a vernacularized classification of death or the cultural appreciation of idol worship - regardless of being urban or rural. It is also a place of mutual habitation between the living and the dead where people live, cleaning the family house: the Leichenhauser. That habitation is mirrored, anchored, by the collective memories of people and amnesia, trauma and other emotions. This text is nothing but an attempt to try and encourage an aspiration and joy towards an abandonment of judgementalism in social spaces without discussing participation or religion. The migrancy of people from the countryside to a necropolis might not be borne out of a desire to participate but socio-political pragmatism, or human despair- and motives that are also prone to migrate and change.
