Catacombs of Kom el Shoqafa

Discovered by accident in 1900, when a donkey is said to have fallen through the ground, the Catacombs of Kom el Shoqafa are the largest known Roman burial complex in Egypt and the strangest sight in the city. You descend a spiral staircase wrapped around a deep central shaft, once used to lower the dead by rope, into three levels cut into the rock (the lowest now flooded and closed). The showpiece is a burial chamber where two worlds collide: an Egyptian-style tomb guarded by the god Anubis, but Anubis dressed as a Roman legionary, and pharaonic figures carved with Greco-Roman faces and drapery. A separate space, the Hall of Caracalla, holds the bones of people and horses tied to a Roman massacre. The name means mound of shards, after the broken pottery left by mourners who held funeral feasts down here. It is cool, dim, and genuinely eerie, unlike anywhere else in Egypt.