When asked about the site, local shopkeepers simply reply “I don’t know”, or “I’m new here”, while Yousif, the clearly irked cemetery guard, refuses to provide any information.
“I’ll only speak to you with permission from the consulate that supervises the cemetery,” he says.
Located on the south side of Al-Balad beside the market for electrical supplies, the cemetery has two entrances, one from a public thoroughfare used to admit funeral processions, the other for visitors and which is accessible via an alleyway of shops that runs past Younis the guard’s sentry room.
The cemetery site is obscured from view by high trees surrounding the entire precinct. There is no information telling of its presence. And there are no signs suggesting that the site dates back to the Hijri year of 948, corresponding approximately to 1541, when the Portuguese fought for several months with the Ottomans and the graveyard was built for their fallen.
According to Sami Nawwar, head of Culture and Tourism at the Jeddah Mayoralty and chairman of the Jeddah Historic District Municipality, the Portuguese dead were buried at the site due to difficulties in transporting bodies back to Iberia by sea.
“Jeddah was a target for the Portuguese as it was a significant trading center in the Islamic world,” Nawwar said. “A fortified wall was built around the town to protect it, and the cemetery as we see it today lay outside that perimeter wall.”
The consulates of Western countries take responsibility for supervising the site, according to Nawwar, but any burial requires the permission of the Jeddah Mayoralty.
“There are some Western reference works that contain information and drawings of the cemetery and an old map demarcating its site. We have seen some old maps marking the cemetery.”
As this reporter asked locals and people working in the area about the cemetery, a degree of anxiety in responding – whether for religious of security reasons – was obvious. Those who did respond to questions asked for their names not to be published, but said that the cemetery contained mostly the graves of Indians and Filipinos.
“Most of the burials we’ve seen have been of children,” they added. “We’ve rarely seen any old people brought here.”
Some said they had not seen a funeral “for years”, while others said funerals were held for two persons last year.
Most of the graves themselves would appear to be of persons young in age, but all of them have been decorated with flowers and lamps and personal written commemorations in addition to the ubiquitous “Rest in Peace”.
Ali Al-Sobai’i, a historical researcher and journalist, said that perhaps the most notable resident of the cemetery was Elia Yenni, an uncle of the well-known Greek shopkeeper Aquily Yenni who is popularly referred to to this day as Khawaja Yenni. Al-Sobai’i described the cemetery as “a significant place that still hasn’t been properly studied”.
“During the Ottaman and Mamluk periods, Jeddah was an open city with many Christian inhabitants who settled because of trade,” he said. “There might be other graveyards that we still don’t know about for Christians or Jews,” he said.
ساعد في نشر والارتقاء بنا عبر مشاركة رأيك في الفيس بوك
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16-06-2011
