The honking of tuk-tuks and cars, which swells up from below to the 12th floor, is now mixed with a loud whistling and occasional knocking.
A glance at the watch: about half an hour until sunset and the Maghrib prayer. It’s pigeon time.
When I first noticed this, I went out onto our balcony to see which children had gotten a new noisy toy.
However, I actually saw a man standing on the roof whistling loudly and waving a Saudi Arabian flag. Not far away, around the corner, a second man stood on the roof of a wooden shed, which towered several meters above the house roof, also whistling loudly with what I believe was a Jamaican flag.
Watch the video to see the pigeon breeder in action:
‘Strange way of communicating,’ I thought at first – ‘must be a secret language.’
Then I realized that both were standing on the roof of a pigeon loft. There are plenty of these wooden structures – or pigeon lofts, ‘Gheya’ (غية) – high above the rooftops of the houses in our neighborhood.
On tight upper corner, where the tall towers are on the horizon, is approximately the Nile.
I count 14 pigeon lofts, ‘Gheya’ (غية).
After some research, I found out that the two men were not communicating with each other, but with their pigeons. The goal is to gather as many pigeons as possible in a flock, both your own and those from other lofts, and then guide the flock into your own loft. Whoever brings the most foreign pigeons into their loft wins.
The hobby aspect is similar to that of pigeon fanciers in the Ruhr region.
However, there is definitely a financial background, as pigeon meat is also traded here as a delicacy. When I tried to talk to our friend Sabid about my discovery of the pigeon lofts using my simple Arabic word sentences, the first reaction to the word الحمام “the pigeons” was that he wanted to order me some food.
And like many things in the land of the pyramids, pigeon breeding – and the associated cuisine – has a millennia-old history, which even predates the pharaohs.
This is really just the short version.
For a more detailed account, there is a documentary by Al Jazeera.
In addition, you can learn a lot about “Garbage City” and the special way of waste disposal in Cairo:
Or in these articles: