Alexandria

Alexander the Great founded the city in 331 BC on the site of a fishing village called Rhakotis, choosing a strip of limestone between the sea and Lake Mariout with a sheltered double harbour behind the island of Pharos. Under the Ptolemies who succeeded him it became the greatest city of the Greek world: a grid of avenues, a royal quarter, the Museum and its Library, and the lighthouse on Pharos, one of the ancient wonders. Euclid, Eratosthenes and Hero worked here, the Hebrew scriptures were translated into Greek here, and the city held perhaps half a million people.

Rome annexed Egypt in 30 BC after the deaths of Cleopatra and Mark Antony, and Alexandria became the empire's second city and its grain port. It was also a turbulent one, with riots, religious violence and the loss of the Library's contents by stages. Christianity took hold early — the Coptic Church dates its foundation to St Mark here — and the city's patriarchs shaped early Christian doctrine. After the Arab conquest of 641 the capital moved inland to Fustat, the canal that fed the city silted up, earthquakes brought down the lighthouse, and Alexandria shrank to a small port on a spit of land.

Its second life began under Muhammad Ali, who dug the Mahmoudiya canal in the 1820s and rebuilt the harbours. Cotton made it rich, and a cosmopolitan population of Greeks, Italians, Jews, Syrians and Maltese filled new European-style quarters. The British bombarded the city in 1882 at the start of their occupation. After the 1952 revolution and the Suez Crisis of 1956, nationalisation and expulsions ended that era and most foreign communities left. The city has since grown into a sprawling Egyptian metropolis, its ancient remains mostly beneath it and, in the harbour, beneath the sea.

Alexandria's identity rests on a double inheritance. One is the cosmopolitan city of the early 20th century, remembered through the poetry of Constantine Cavafy, who lived and worked here, the novels of Lawrence Durrell and Naguib Mahfouz's Miramar, and preserved in the Italianate apartment blocks, the old patisseries, the trams and a handful of Greek institutions that survive. The other is the present: a large, largely conservative Egyptian city with strong religious currents, where the Sufi moulid at the Abu al-Abbas al-Mursi mosque draws crowds and the Coptic cathedral of St Mark is the seat of a patriarchate that traces its foundation to the evangelist.

Alexandrians insist they are different from Cairenes — slower, more sardonic, more attached to the sea. Their accent is recognisable, and the evening walk along the corniche is a civic habit rather than a tourist activity. Fishing from the seawall, swimming in the small bays from June onwards, and long family lunches over fish are the shared pleasures.

The city has a serious cultural life beyond the monuments: the library's exhibitions and concerts, an art scene around the city's villa museums and private galleries, and the ballet and opera seasons at the Sayed Darwish Theatre, named after the Alexandrian composer credited with founding modern Egyptian music. Football is followed through the local clubs Al Ittihad and Smouha as well as the Cairo giants.

About 6.1 million people lived in Alexandria and its urban area in 2023, making it Egypt's second city, strung along about 40 kilometres of coast and pressing inland towards Lake Mariout. The eastern districts are the more prosperous, the western quarters around the harbour the oldest and most crowded, and new suburbs continue to spread south and west towards Borg El Arab.

The port is the foundation of the economy: the Western Harbour handles a large share of Egypt's trade. Oil refining, petrochemicals, cement, textiles and food processing employ tens of thousands, alongside the university, the hospitals and a summer tourist season that sustains hotels, beach cabins and restaurants for three months of the year.

Daily life runs along the coast road. Commuters take trams, minibuses and the suburban trains; the fish market works before dawn; the afternoon empties in summer and refills after sunset, when families walk the corniche and the cafés open. The pressures are familiar: crowded housing and the collapse of older blocks, traffic, pollution in Lake Mariout, and a coastline that is eroding, with rising sea levels a long-term threat to a low-lying city and to the Delta behind it.

Alexandria eats fish. The standard meal is the catch chosen by weight at a counter and then grilled over charcoal or fried — sea bass, mullet, bream, red mullet, shrimp, calamari and crab — served with tahini, salads, pickles and bread. Sayadeya, fish baked or stewed with rice browned in caramelised onions, is the city's signature cooked dish, and the fish soup and grilled shrimp of Abu Qir draw people out along the bay.

Its street food is just as well known. Kebda eskandarani, Alexandrian liver, is beef liver fried hard with garlic, chilli and sweet pepper and packed into bread; sogo', spiced sausage, is served the same way. Foul and ta'meya start the day, and the flat, chewy bread of the coast comes from ovens on every street. Feseekh, mullet salted and fermented for weeks, is eaten at Sham el-Nessim in spring with spring onions and lime, a custom traced back to pharaonic times and treated with great seriousness here.

The city's European past survives on the sweet side: Greek and Italian-founded patisseries downtown still sell baklava beside éclairs, ice cream and petits fours, and old tearooms keep their marble and mirrors. Otherwise it is Egyptian — rice pudding and mahallabiya from dairy shops, kunafa and qatayef in Ramadan, mango and sugar cane juice from corner bars, and very sweet tea drunk all day along the corniche.