Sensation of modern Christianity.
“The Cave Church” in Garbage City
September 13, 2013 0
The Monastery of Saint Simeon is the largest religious structure in the Middle East, able to accommodate up to 20,000 worshippers. It is known not only for its scale, but also for its unique location: instead of familiar church vaults, the walls of a cave deep inside Mount Mokattam (Cairo, Egypt) form the interior. 
The monastery was built in honor of Simeon the Tanner, a saint who, according to tradition, saved thousands of fellow believers. It was constructed by the Zabbaleen, Egyptian residents who collect and recycle garbage. They live in a Christian quarter on the outskirts of Cairo, which bears the “telling” name of Garbage City. The Zabbaleen are descendants of peasants who migrated from Upper Egypt to Cairo in the 1940s. Initially the migrants farmed, raising pigs, goats and chickens, but this brought them little income. They then began collecting garbage from city dwellers, picking out items that had at least some value, as well as “edible” waste that served as animal feed in lean years. The inhabitants of the “garbage” village soon realized that such unenviable “business” could yield decent profits. 
For a long time the Zabbaleen built no houses, hiding from municipal authorities. In time, however, they settled at the foot of Mount Mokattam on the edge of Cairo. In the 1980s the population there was around 8,000; today it has grown to 30,000. 
Although Egypt is a Muslim country, the Zabbaleen are Copts, that is, Egyptian Christians. Many members of this social group could have left Mokattam, but religious feeling holds them there. The Monastery of Saint Simeon the Cobbler was built in 1975. After the Zabbaleen acquired their own church, they felt more confident and began building houses of brick and stone—whereas before (remembering the eviction from Giza in 1970) they had lived in huts. Source — Kulturologia
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