A new mural in Cairo covers more than 40 buildings. The result is stunning.

The streets of the Cairo suburb Manshiyat Naser, nicknamed "Garbage City," are lined with trash, and the people who live there — Coptic Christians who make their living sorting through it and recycling anything they can — are called zabaleen, or "garbage people."

But the sides of more than 40 buildings in Manshiyat Naser are now covered in something else: a gorgeous mural of Arabic calligraphy by the French-Tunisian street artist eL Seed, a jumble of bright colors that becomes a coherent whole only when seen from a distance:

The words in the calligraphy are a quote from a Coptic Christian bishop: "Anyone who wants to see the sunlight clearly needs to wipe his eye first." The purpose of the project, according to the artist, was to get people to see the neighborhood in a different light:

Painting the mural was a massive project involving dozens of buildings:

eL Seed calls his work "calligraffiti," mingling the traditional art of Arabic calligraphy with vibrant street art. He's painted before in Tunisia, France, Los Angeles, and Dubai, promoting messages of cross-cultural understanding.

Go deeper:

• The New Yorker's Peter Hessler wrote about the zabaleen and Cairo's trash ecosystem in 2014, diving both into how the system works and the life of his own garbage collector: "As a whole, Cairo’s waste-collection system is surprisingly functional, considering that it’s largely informal. In a sprawling, chaotic city of more than seventeen million, zabaleen like Sayyid have managed to develop one of the most efficient municipal recycling networks in the world."
• The blog suzeeinthecity tracks street art around Cairo, including political reinterpretations of ancient Egyptian murals and the graffiti that appeared in the wake of Egypt's 2011 revolution.
• eL Seed — whose name comes from the Arabic word for "the lord" or "the master," and from a 17th-century French play — gave a five-minute TED talk about his art and identity in 2015: "I don't write the translation of the message anymore on the wall," he said. "I don't want the poetry of the calligraphy to be broken. … Some people see that as a rejection or a closed door, but for me, it's more an invitation — to my language, to my culture, and to my art."

Will you support Vox’s explanatory journalism?

Most news outlets make their money through advertising or subscriptions. But when it comes to what we’re trying to do at Vox, there are a couple of big issues with relying on ads and subscriptions to keep the lights on:

First, advertising dollars go up and down with the economy. We often only know a few months out what our advertising revenue will be, which makes it hard to plan ahead.

Second, we’re not in the subscriptions business. Vox is here to help everyone understand the complex issues shaping the world — not just the people who can afford to pay for a subscription. We believe that’s an important part of building a more equal society. And we can’t do that if we have a paywall.

So even though advertising is still our biggest source of revenue, we also seek grants and reader support. (And no matter how our work is funded, we have strict guidelines on editorial independence.)

If you also believe that everyone deserves access to trusted high-quality information, will you make a gift to Vox today? Any amount helps.

One-Time Monthly Annual

$5/month

$10/month

$25/month

$50/month

Other

$

Yes, I'll give $5/month

Yes, I'll give $5/month

We accept credit card, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. You can also contribute via