Basatin is Cairo's main Jewish cemetery, covering around 120 acres on the edge of Maadi. Graves here date back centuries, making it one of the oldest Jewish burial grounds in the Middle East. The cemetery records the history of Cairo's once large and prosperous Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewish community, which numbered tens of thousands before the mass emigration following 1948 and 1956.
Today the community it served has almost entirely departed — only a handful of elderly Jews remain in Cairo — and the cemetery is maintained by a skeleton staff. Visiting requires permission from the local Jewish community representative. The scale of the site, the age of the oldest stones, and the absence of most of the families who once tended them combine to make it one of the more quietly moving places in Greater Cairo.