Port Said

Port Said was created out of nothing in April 1859, when the first pickaxe struck the sandbar between the Mediterranean and Lake Manzala to begin the Suez Canal. Named after Sa'id Pasha, the ruler who granted Ferdinand de Lesseps his concession, it began as a camp of huts on imported stone and grew with the works. The canal opened in November 1869, and the town became the northern gate of the route between Europe and Asia: a coaling station, a pilot base and a place where ships took on stores and crews took on shore leave.

That traffic made it unlike anywhere else in the Delta. Greeks, Italians, Maltese, French and Levantines settled beside Egyptians, the canal company laid out the grid of arcaded streets that still stands, and the port handled mail, coal and passengers for every line sailing east. A monumental statue of de Lesseps by Emmanuel Frémiet stood at the canal entrance from November 1899 until it was taken down in December 1956.

The 20th century brought the city repeated damage. Egypt nationalised the canal company in July 1956, and in the fighting that autumn British and French forces landed at Port Said before withdrawing in December, an event the city still marks each year. The canal was closed from 1967 to 1975, and during those years much of the population was evacuated and parts of the city were destroyed in the fighting along the waterway. Reconstruction followed the reopening, and in 1976 Port Said was made a duty-free zone, which drew Egyptian shoppers and new industry. Today it lives from the canal, the container terminals and its free-zone trade, with the old quarter increasingly recognised as heritage worth keeping.

Port Saidis regard themselves as a distinct people within Egypt — a port population, formed by mixing, proud of having been bombed and rebuilt, and quick to say so. The city's nickname among Egyptians is the valiant city, a reference to 1956, and the memory of that year and of the evacuation after 1967 runs through local speech, street names and public monuments.

Its best-known cultural export is music played on the simsimiyya, a small lyre found along the canal, which accompanies the sung, danced sessions of the local musicians known as suhbagiyya, with call-and-response verses about the sea, work and the city itself. The tradition grew among sailors, dockers and the men who rowed out to trade with anchored ships, and it is still performed at weddings and civic celebrations.

Everyday manners are Egyptian and Deltaic: long greetings, insistent hospitality, coffee houses as the centre of male social life, and a slower rhythm on Fridays. Football matters a great deal, and the local club, Al Masry, carries the city's identity in a rivalry with Cairo's big teams. The beach is a family space, where most Egyptian women swim fully dressed, and the Corniche fills on summer evenings with strollers, vendors and children long after dark.

About 790,000 people lived in Port Said in 2024, with Port Fuad across the water counted separately and joined to it by ferry; together the two make a metropolitan area of more than a million. The governorate is one of Egypt's smallest, squeezed between the sea, the canal and Lake Manzala, and almost everything in it relates to the waterway: pilotage and the canal authority, tugs and shipyards, the container terminals at the eastern approach, fishing fleets and the free-zone trade.

Work follows the ships. Pilots board vessels here for the transit south, dockers and agents handle transhipment cargo, and a large part of the city works in shops, warehouses and small workshops supplying goods that arrive duty-free. Fishing on the lake and the sea supports villages on the city's edge. Wages are modest, and like the rest of Egypt households have felt sharp inflation and repeated devaluation of the pound in recent years, while the drop in canal traffic since late 2023 has been felt in the port economy.

Daily rhythm is coastal: an early start, a long afternoon pause in the humidity, and a second life after sunset when families come out to the beach and the canal front. Housing has spread west along the shore in blocks of flats, while the old grid, with its verandas and wooden shutters, has thinned as owners replace houses with taller buildings — a loss that local campaigners have spent years contesting.

Fish dominates. Boats land sea fish from the Mediterranean and freshwater fish from Lake Manzala, and the standard meal is a whole fish or a plate of shrimp picked at the ice counter, weighed, then grilled or fried and served with tahini, salad and rice or bread. Sayadeya, fish baked with rice coloured and sweetened by long-cooked onions, is the dish of the coast. Mullet, sea bass, sole, shrimp, crab and calamari all appear, and gambari, large prawns, are the treat.

Beyond the sea the food is Delta food, cheap and filling. Ful medames, slow-cooked broad beans, and taameya, the Egyptian falafel made from split broad beans, are the breakfast; koshary, the layered dish of rice, lentils, macaroni, fried onion and tomato sauce, is the everyday lunch; and kebda, liver fried hard with garlic, chilli and green pepper and pushed into bread, is the late-night sandwich shared with Alexandria. Gebna domiati, the soft white cheese of nearby Damietta, is on every breakfast table, and mish, its sharp aged cousin, on many.

Sweets and drinks follow the season. Sugarcane juice, hibiscus and mint tea are sold on the street, coffee houses serve strong tea and Turkish coffee with shisha, and ice-cream and fresh fruit juice stands stay open late along the beach road in summer. Salted and dried fish, eaten at Sham el-Nessim in spring, is a Port Said speciality as well as a national custom.