Nothing in the consular handbook prepares you for a request like this one.
An unexpected message
In mid-2009, the Embassy in Cairo was contacted by our Honorary Consul in Luxor, Mr Ehab Gaddis, with a startling message. As part of his beautification plans for the city, the Governor of Luxor, Dr Samir Farag, wanted the foreigners’ graveyard, including its interred residents, moved. A new site would be provided about 20 kilometres away in the desert.
Luxor was in the middle of an ambitious programme to modernise the city and present it as an open-air museum, with roads widened, modern structures cleared from around the ancient temples and a tourist corridor created. The cemetery sat on land the city wanted to redevelop.
The place being moved
The original Foreigners’ Cemetery lay in central Luxor, near the Nile and the major archaeological zones. Established in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was the final resting place of expatriates, diplomats, travellers and Egyptologists who died in the region. Among them was Ernest Harold Jones, the Welsh artist and archaeologist who worked in the Valley of the Kings with Howard Carter and Theodore Davis before dying of tuberculosis in 1911.
These were people from many nationalities who had played a part in Luxor’s story, and moving them raised real questions about heritage as well as logistics.
No room for negotiation
This did not go down well at the Embassy. To make matters worse, the Governor set a deadline: the work had to be completed within three months, or he would go ahead and oversee the relocation himself. There was no room for compromise. The Governor was a former army general and used to getting his own way, which may explain his unbending attitude.
Following diplomatic procedure, and instructed by my Ambassador, I went to the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Cairo to lodge a formal protest. I was told the Governor was within his legal rights. The land belonged to the city, and the beautification project had strong backing from the government in Cairo.
So the die was cast. A question nagged at me throughout, and I asked it many times without ever getting a decent answer: why was it the British who were being asked to make sure the move was carried out?
Getting it done
First, I obtained a list of everyone buried in the cemetery and, in particular, their nationalities. Then followed a long week trying to contact as many as possible of the diplomatic missions whose citizens were buried there. In all, there were about 92 graves.
Thanks to some extremely able support and a good deal of thinking outside several boxes, the many and varied residents of the foreigners’ cemetery were transferred and re-interred, with due respect and ceremony, within the time frame.
The Governor was helpful and provided a labour force under the direction of a general, or retired general, from the Egyptian Army. Practicalities were another matter. I had not worked in a developing country before, and I had to adjust a great deal. Health and safety considerations were essentially non-existent and resources were short:
- They had an excavator to dig the graves at the new cemetery, but nothing to shift the large monuments.
- A forklift designed for smooth concrete floors was brought to the Anglican cemetery, but it could not get through the gateway or up the two-inch step, so the men levered large granite memorials off the graves with whatever metal bars they could find.
- Protective equipment was handed out on the first day and not again, so the men had no gloves or masks after that.
Families, the Governor and a speech
I received a couple of emails from relatives of the deceased. They seemed satisfied with my explanation of what I was doing and how their relative would be transferred to the new cemetery.
I met the Governor often, either on site or when he called me to his office in the evenings. I found him easy to get on with, and I had his confidence to solve his cemetery problem for him. He even asked my advice about the event to mark the completion of the project, and asked me to draft his speech. I heard my words in his address, expertly grafted with some phrases of his own. The British Ambassador gave his speech in Arabic, of course, which went down very well with the guests, and the visiting dignitaries showed suitable interest and decorum at the new cemetery.
A year on
I returned in 2010 with my wife and daughter to see both cemeteries a year after the move. The transformation of the new cemetery was amazing, and it looked really good. The original site looked like some sort of Disney garden, with no sign of any imminent construction work.
It was an unusual and often unpleasant task, but it was done with care, and I am glad that it was.
