StapleEgypt
Eish Baladi
Wholemeal pocket bread baked at ferocious heat so it balloons. The word eish means life in Egyptian Arabic rather than bread, and its price has brought down governments.
Serves Makes 8 · 2 hours 30 minutes
Zabbaleen
Cairo's garbage collectors, mostly Coptic Christians who came from Upper Egypt with pigs, who recycle around eighty per cent of what they collect, which is roughly double what any municipal system in the world manages.
Identity
Population: Estimated 50,000 to 70,000
Location: Manshiyat Naser (Garbage City) below the Mokattam cliffs, and settlements at Ezbet el-Nakhl and Torah
Language: Egyptian Arabic; Coptic in liturgy
Language family: Afro-Asiatic → Semitic → Arabic; Coptic (liturgical, Afro-Asiatic → Egyptian)
Traditional governance: Family-based collection routes with hereditary rights to particular buildings; the Association for the Protection of the Environment and the Spirit of Youth organisation represent the community.
Clans, Sections & Sub-groups (3)
Most African peoples are federations of named sub-groups (clans, sections, chiefdoms or sub-tribes), each with its own dialect, territory and traditions.
Coptic collector families
The majority, originally from Asyut and Sohag in Upper Egypt.
Wahiya
Muslim families from the Dakhla oasis who held the collection concessions and sublet routes to the Zabbaleen.
Sorters and recyclers
Households specialising in a single material: plastic, textile, paper, metal or glass.
Culture
Clothing: Working clothes; the community's women and girls do most of the sorting, which is done by hand, indoors, in the same rooms families live in.
Food: Ordinary Egyptian food; pork, which the Coptic Zabbaleen eat and which is why the pigs mattered so much beyond their role in consuming organic waste.
Ceremonies: Coptic Orthodox liturgy at the Monastery of Saint Simon, a set of churches carved into the Mokattam cliff seating tens of thousands; saints' feasts; the moulid of Saint Simon the Tanner.
Marriage customs: Coptic Orthodox marriage; endogamy within the community is strong, reinforced by both religion and occupation.
Initiation rites: Children learn sorting from early childhood, which is both the community's economic basis and the subject of a long campaign to get them into school instead.
Food & Recipes
Every dish the Atlas publishes for Egypt, at national rather than community level — 9 in all: the staple a household eats daily, the dish the country names as its own, street food, what is cooked for a wedding or Eid, regional specialities and a drink. Quantities and method are given for every one, so these are recipes rather than descriptions, and each has a photograph from Wikimedia Commons. The Food page carries the whole continent, searchable by country and by ingredient.
National dishEgypt
Koshari
also Kushari
Rice, lentils and macaroni under spiced tomato sauce, garlic vinegar and fried onions. Assembled in the nineteenth century from Indian, Italian and Egyptian parts, and now the national dish, sold by the ton from dedicated shops.
Serves 6 · 1 hour 15 minutes
Street foodEgypt
Ta'ameya
also Egyptian falafel
Falafel made with dried fava beans rather than chickpeas, bright green inside from a mass of herbs. Egypt's version predates the chickpea one, and Egyptians will tell you so without being asked.
Serves Makes 20 · 40 minutes, plus 24 hours soaking
Street foodEgypt
Hawawshi
also Egyptian stuffed bread
Spiced minced meat with onion and chilli packed into baladi bread and baked hard until the fat soaks the crust. Cairo's late-night sandwich.
Serves 4 · 50 minutes
Festival & feastEgypt
Fattah
Toasted bread and rice under lamb, with a garlic and vinegar tomato sauce poured over. Made for Eid al-Adha with the sacrificed animal, and for the celebration of a first child.
Serves 8 · 3 hours
Festival & feastEgypt
Mahshi
also Stuffed vegetables, Wara2 3enab
Vine leaves, courgettes and peppers stuffed with herbed rice and simmered in tomato broth. The dish an Egyptian household spends a whole morning on, for guests and for feast days.
Serves 8 · 2 hours 30 minutes
Regional specialityEgypt
Molokhia
also Mulukhiyah
Finely chopped jute mallow leaves cooked in broth to a deliberately viscous green soup, finished with a hiss of fried garlic and coriander. Eaten in the Delta and Cairo alike, and divisive nowhere in Egypt.
Serves 6 · 45 minutes
Drink & sweetEgypt
Karkadeh
also Hibiscus tea
Dried hibiscus calyces steeped to a deep crimson, drunk iced in summer and hot in winter. Served at weddings across Egypt and Sudan, and once reserved for the pharaohs in the version Egyptians like to tell.
Serves 6 · 20 minutes, plus chilling
Drink & sweetEgypt
Sahlab
also Salep, Winter milk drink
Thick sweet milk drink of orchid-root starch, scented with rosewater and topped with coconut, cinnamon and nuts. The Egyptian winter street drink.
Serves 4 · 20 minutes
Stories & Oral Literature
Better Than Any MunicipalityEconomic and environmental account
The Zabbaleen recycle an estimated eighty per cent of the waste they collect, sorting by hand and feeding organic matter to pigs. Western municipal systems typically manage twenty to twenty-five per cent. In 2003 Cairo contracted foreign waste companies who guaranteed twenty per cent recycling and collected from street bins rather than doors, and the system worked considerably worse.
The Pig CullContemporary account
In 2009, during the H1N1 outbreak, Egypt ordered the slaughter of every pig in the country. The World Health Organization said the flu was not transmitted by pigs. Around 300,000 animals were destroyed, the Zabbaleen lost the mechanism that consumed Cairo's organic waste and a large part of their income, and the organic waste began piling up in the streets. It is widely regarded as one of the clearer policy failures of its decade.
Proverbs
“What the city throws away, we read like a book.”
Sorting as expertise.
“The pig ate what no truck could carry.”
What was lost in 2009.
“We are cleaner than the people who call us dirty.”
A community's answer to the name it is given.
Mythology & Spiritual Beliefs
Creation: Coptic Orthodox cosmology; the community's own foundational story is Saint Simon the Tanner, held to have moved the Mokattam mountain in the tenth century.
Beliefs: Coptic Orthodox Christianity; the cliff churches of Saint Simon are a major pilgrimage site; healing and exorcism services draw people from across Egypt.
Ancestors: Families trace origin to specific Upper Egyptian villages in Asyut and Sohag, from which they migrated to Cairo from the 1930s and 1940s.
Gods, Goddesses & Spirits
The Christian God
Worshipped in the Coptic Orthodox rite
Saint Simon the Tanner
Held to have moved the Mokattam mountain; the community's patron and the name of its cave churches
The Virgin Mary
Central to Coptic devotion, with apparition traditions in Cairo
Architecture
Traditional settlements: Manshiyat Naser: multi-storey brick buildings below the Mokattam cliff, with sorting floors at ground level, granulating machinery above and families living among it.
Building techniques: Red brick and concrete self-building, extended upward as families grow; the Monastery of Saint Simon carved directly into the limestone cliff with reliefs cut by a Polish artist.
Village layout: Narrow streets between buildings whose ground floors hold sorted material by type, with the cave churches above the settlement in the quarry face.
Artifacts
Monastery of Saint Simon
Heritage site
Churches carved into the Mokattam cliff, the largest seating around 20,000.
Hand-sorting floors
Livelihood
Ground-floor rooms where material is separated by type, achieving 80 per cent recovery.
Granulating machines
Technology
Plastic shredders bought and run by families, the community's own industrial investment.
Recycled-material crafts
Craft
Rag rugs, paper and textiles made by women's cooperatives from sorted waste.
Historical Timeline
1930s–1940s
Coptic families from Asyut and Sohag migrate to Cairo and take up waste collection with pigs.
1970s–1980s
The community is moved to Manshiyat Naser below Mokattam; recycling develops into an industry.
2003
Cairo contracts foreign waste companies, bypassing the Zabbaleen and lowering recycling rates.
2009
Egypt culls every pig in the country during H1N1; organic waste collection collapses.
2010s–present
The city partially reintegrates the Zabbaleen into formal contracts; the community's recycling rate remains unmatched.
Sources & Further Reading
Open sources
- Britannica: CairoEncyclopaedia Britannica
- UN-Habitat: solid waste management in CairoUN-Habitat
Premium & scholarly sources