Hajj · a Light

Mina is a city of tents empty fifty weeks a year

Mina is a narrow valley five kilometres east of Makkah where pilgrims sleep for three or four nights of the Hajj and throw pebbles at three stone markers. After a fire in 1997 killed hundreds of people, the canvas was replaced with fibreglass coated tents on fixed steel frames, about a hundred thousand of them, laid out in numbered streets with their own hospitals and fire mains. The Jamarat itself has been rebuilt twice. The current structure, finished between 2006 and 2009, is a multi level bridge with separate ramps for each direction, designed for a flow measured in hundreds of thousands per hour. It was built because crowds crushed on the old bridge, most severely in 1990 and again in 2015.

Mina, near Makkah