# Alexandria (a series of articles #2)



## MensEtManus (Jul 30, 2009)

*Rolling back the centuries in Egypt's second city*
_Saturday, November 10, 2007
_By Stephen Franklin, Chicago Tribune


ALEXANDRIA, Egypt -- As the old hotel elevator rumbles upward, its antiquarian wood and brass cage carries me backward.

Back to the 1930s when the Cecil Hotel -- staring out at an ancient harbor, a busy square and chic European-style patisseries -- was the gathering place for aspiring (and already world-famous) writers, for social climbers and for curious foreigners caught up in Egypt's mystique.Back to a breezy, Mediterranean city on the edge of Africa that once felt like Marseilles and London and Naples and Istanbul, and a mixture of everything from the Middle East thrown into an exotic urban stew.

Back to a decades-old cosmopolitan elegance.

What draws me in 2007 to Alexandria, the heart of which is a tiny isthmus between two harbors, is exactly this: a long-lingering connection to the past with just enough taste of the new.

I am not talking about the remnants of the ancient city left behind by the Greeks and Romans, the city that young Alexander the Great had envisioned as a great port for his empire and the city of Cleopatra.

Today, much of that Alexandria sleeps on out in the bay, waiting to be rediscovered, or lies buried under the modern city's bustling streets, where 5 million wander daily.

Instead, I am drawn by the nearly 5-year-old Bibliotheca Alexandrina, which was inspired by the ancient library in Alexandria, and which feels as new as anything anywhere. It is an imaginative $200-million high-tech tribute to the library that vanished here more than 1,600 years ago.

The largest library of its time, it was where the Old Testament was translated from Hebrew to Greek, and scholars gathered to study astronomy, physics and anatomy. While its destruction is a mystery buried in time, its disappearance became a symbol of the price societies pay for the loss of their written soul and memory.

The new library, designed by Norwegian architects, looks from the distance like a silvery sun rising. And because it is located on the edge of the 11-mile-long Corniche, the seaside promenade that curls along much of the waterfront in Alexandria, the visual impact is quite dramatic.

Imagine. The bottom of the building's circular face sits slightly below street level with the building tilting upward to 11 stories at the top.

Inside, you feel as if you have entered a parallel universe, especially if you have been meandering about amid the dust and decay of old Alexandria.

The library is a vast atrium with one wall looking out at the sea and sky. Standing on the street level, you look down at several levels of floors with row after row of desks and people busily glued to computers. For the moment, I am struck by the hope offered by such a building in a country where so many cannot read, and where so few who can actually read books.

Not far away is another innovative use of the city's past.

The Alexandria National Museum is an elaborate, gleaming white Italian-style, three-story building that was built for a wealthy businessman in the late 1920s, then became an American consulate before it was bought by the Egyptian Ministry of Culture.

Opened about four years ago, the museum sits in an older upscale neighborhood that is greener than most. Its collection runs from pre-historic and pharaonic to Greco-Roman to Coptic and Islamic, and finally to items from Egypt's last royal family.

Wandering through the tasteful and innovatively designed rooms for the first time, I decide that after dozens of trips over 40 years to Egypt as a reporter or meandering tourist, this is my second favorite museum in the country (next to the Coptic Museum in Cairo).

This year while living in Cairo and training Egyptian journalists there, I also came down with a serious case of crypt overload, the result of having visited countless ancient burial sites in Cairo and elsewhere. And so I consider this to be a life-saving antidote to crawling underground in breathlessly hot tombs with a zillion other tourists.

On a warm night, I go off in search of another monument, the el Montaza Palace Gardens, and discover a place I had not planned on visiting. It was too far for a walk from the old city and I didn't feel like taking a trip. But, as I discovered, it is only a long taxi ride along the Corniche to get to this 19th Century palace, which served as the Egyptian royal family's summer home until the 1952 revolution that ended their rule.

The palace is surrounded by acres of greenery with walkways curling through leafy public gardens and leading to a delicious looking private beach that belongs to the Helnan Palestine Hotel, a five-star hotel built for an Arab summit in 1964. On this night, crowds of people are gathering here to linger away the evening, many drawn to a wedding at one end of the park. Hours later, many are still here, savoring the quiet green haven.

Alexandria is a city whose mosques, churches and synagogues have been the record-keepers of generations, and I search out some of them.

Within sight of the sea in an old Ottoman area sits the tall, high-domed Mosque of Abu al-Abbas al Mursi, the city's largest mosque, which was rebuilt in the late 1940s. Abu al-Abbas, an Andalusian, came to Alexandria in the 13th century.

I am here late on a Friday afternoon, the day of sabbath for Muslims, and the mosque's grounds seem bazaar-like. Families have stayed on after the prayers, and many seem cemented to the lush grass surrounding the mosque.

Inside the mosque, where bright sunlight filters dramatically through panels from high up, men stand in a circle praying and singing. They are Sufis Muslims, who, among other things, believe in chanting their prayers too. An elderly man claps the beat as they sing, and soon their prayers are over.

Within a short walk from the center of the old city is the Eliahu Hanabi synagogue, a 19th Century building where a Jewish house of prayer had stood since the 14th century. But the well-guarded building for the few remaining Jews of Alexandria is not easily accessible to visitors, and I am never able to visit it. Despite my pleas about wanting to see all of Alexandria during my brief stay, the guards turn me away, saying each time that I visit that it is not open.

From the synagogue, I stay on Sharia Nabi Daniel (the Street of the Prophet Daniel), and in a few minutes and after a few turns, I am at the Souk Attarine. Once it sold spices and perfumes from distant markets and countries. Nowadays, it is an antique market, and after a few minutes, I consider it one of my favorites in all the Middle East.

I like the adventure of wandering up and down small streets, not knowing what is next. There's no sense of the suffocation that you get from the giant, old marketplaces. Attarine is not enclosed and it rambles for blocks. The streets are so narrow cars can't get through many of them. Some stores are crowded beyond imagination. They have been cut in half to create a small second story.

"It's too hard to find good old things," complains an elderly shopkeeper in the doorway of one of these tiny stores, who doesn't blink as we chit-chat in Arabic, a language I learned a quarter of a century ago. I find his words hard to believe because his store has an unbelievable selection of fine old ceramics, mirrors and furniture. But I agree with him, and try to keep a stoic uninterested glance so I won't ruin my bargaining mojo.

Like the antique dealer, some Egyptians feel a sense of loss when talking about their Alexandria.

"It's not the city I once knew," an elderly Egyptian journalist had said to me one day in Cairo with a sad shake of his shoulders after I told him of my plans to visit Alexandria, and his lament is not uncommon among Egyptians about their nation's second biggest city.

It is not as cosmopolitan, they say. Not as liberal. Not as pretty. Not as exciting as it once was.

The city has lost the energy, which they say existed more than half a century ago when it had thriving immigrant communities and was the place where people loyally sought refuge in the terribly hot summer.

They are probably right.

Along Egypt's Red Sea are booming new resorts. Even in Alexandria, many Egyptians seem to prefer the newer areas where the Corniche is broader, cleaner, better kept, more crowded, more fashionable and more up-to-date.

They do not seem to mind that the flashy hotels going up near the beaches and rows of newly built anonymous-looking apartment houses could be anywhere in the world.

But it is also true that Alexandria has long lived with what the great Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz once described as a "nostalgia steeped in honey and tears."

Lawrence Durrell, whose days here during World War II inspired him years later to write "The Alexandria Quartet," similarly called the city the capital of memories.

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## MensEtManus (Jul 30, 2009)

(cont'd).....

The Alexandria that Durrell and others miss is the city that blossomed in the 19th century after Mohammed Ali, the founder of modern-day Egypt, threw open his country to foreigners, foreign learning and new ideas.

It was a city where Greeks, Italians, Syrians, Turks and other travelers tumbled in, speaking a babel of languages. French became a major language, which is why many street signs are in French as well as Arabic.

It was a city of the Mediterranean: the sun, the sea and the way of life that went with them.

But after the 1952 revolution, many immigrants began to leave. The wealth that had nurtured extravagance in Alexandria dried up as Egypt tried to level the great differences between the rich and poor by cracking down on the rich. With the attack on Egypt by Britain and France in the 1956 Suez War, many English and French along with Egyptian Jews were also forced out.

Cairo grew and thrived, while Alexandria basked in the sea breezes and dozed.

On the way back to the Corniche, and the Cecil Hotel where Durrell and countless famous others stayed (a fact I know because their names are listed on the wall), I am trying to understand this history when I pass the house of one of Durrell's literary favorites in Alexandria. It's the apartment of the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy and has been a small museum for the last 15 years. He died here in 1933, having spent the last 35 years of his life in the same apartment.

I climb the marble steps and enter a series of rooms that feel almost transcendental. It is cool, dark. The wind ruffles a thin white curtain. Here is the small office where Cavafy described the Greek Orthodox church on his street and the Greek Hospital and bordellos nearby as "the temples of the soul, the body and the flesh."

Where, he wrote almost a century ago:

You won't find a new country, won't find another shore

The city will always pursue you

You'll walk the same streets, grow old

In the same neighborhoods, turn grey in

These same houses

You'll always end up in this city.

Continuing on toward the Corniche a short while later, I come to the Brazil Coffee Shop, where fresh coffee is being roasted in a large old roaster. I stand here at a stool while drinking freshly brewed coffee in a store founded in 1929 and sense the camaraderie of the people shuffling in and out. But I'm also attracted to the faded charm of Delices, a patisserie from the same era. It faces Saad Zaghlul square, the large plaza where my hotel is located.

I sit at a sidewalk table, soak up some sunshine, nibble at a pastry and watch crowds and horse-drawn carriages pass by.

Back in the hotel, I ride the old elevator upward, pull apart its metal gate, pass under a large old chandelier on a top floor of the 78-year-old hotel, unlock the door to my room and throw open the old, thick wooden shutters.

The large room flashes from dark to a brilliant blinding yellow, the Mediterranean sun pouring in.

_Source: Rolling back the centuries in Egypt's second city
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