Alexandria, once home to one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, has always been a dynamic city. Over the centuries it has steadily reinvented itself, blending influences from Greece, Rome, Britain and France while retaining a distinctive North African flavour. Stephanie Debere combines her visit with a pilgrimage to the battlefields of El Alamein.
 We travelled around Alexandria largely by limousine. Not my usual style when exploring abroad, but when we’d asked for a taxi, our hotel concierge had politely indicated that there were limousines outside. An ordinary taxi would do, I’d protested, but he insisted a limousine was preferable, and the driver would speak English. Realising we were getting nowhere, we thanked him and wondered out, only to see a row of battered blue seventies Peugeots – Alexandria’s limousines.
And so we found Reda, the limo driver who transformed our visit from one shaped by the guidebook to one that included my family’s past. I’d come with my mother, who lived here as a girl in the 1940s, when my grandfather worked for the Foreign Office. She hadn’t been back since. We came to discover what of her childhood remained, but we fell for a city whose spell stretched far beyond our family link.
Reza’s blue Peugeot sped us down Alexandria’s life-vein, the Corniche, once a serene coast road backing quiet beaches where my mother learned to swim, now a charging six-lane highway. It snakes between the Mediterranean and seafront apartment blocks, an 18-km concrete charm-bracelet dangling attractions, the best-known of which is the city’s futuristic library.
Backed by UNESCO and opened in 2002, it inherits the mantle of the ancient library that was the pride of the city founded by Alexander the Great in 331BC. Its ambitious design centres on a glass disc over 500m in circumference, tilted into the earth towards the sea, rising like a sun. Symbols from every known script adorn its stone walls. Under the disc lies the vast, tiered reading room, where readers work on terraces of desks, between bookshelves and 600 concrete columns.
Outside, a giant statue raised from Cleopatra’s palace under the harbour waters stands on guard – a reminder that you need never look far here for remnants of the ancient world. You can turn the corner of a modern street and be faced with gaping Roman ruins. There are the Greek Anfunshi Tombs, the 25-metre Pompey’s pillar, and the eerie 2nd-century Catacombs of Kom es-Shoqafa, where Egyptian and Roman gods cavort amid Greek–style decor 35m beneath the city.
The Lighthouse of Pharos, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, once rose from a sea-swept promontory west of the Corniche. Destroyed by an earthquake in 1303, its place is now occupied by Fort Qaitbey, a film-set-perfect medieval castle. Within its thick ramparts (restored after a 19th century scuffle with the British Navy), we were mobbed by smiling schoolchildren wanting to practise their English and photograph us on their mobile phones.
Yet Alexandria is no museum: it’s a pulsating Eastern city with 3.5 million inhabitants, plus another million escaping Cairo’s summer heat.
Despite world politics, it’s relaxed and welcoming to westerners, its seafaring people used to looking towards other cultures. Western fashions have replaced the fezzes and black robes of my mother’s childhood, although the women retain pretty headscarves. People offered courteous greetings as we strolled along the Corniche in the evenings, and we felt welcome inside the vast El-Mursi Mosque, whose sublime curves break the skyline.
Modern Egypt has clearly reclaimed a city once among Africa’s most international. In 1869, having built the Suez Canal, Egypt went bust. A Franco-British condominium took over the economy, and European society established itself – evidence of which is ubiquitous. Parts of the Corniche, lined by palms and 19th-century apartment blocks, look pure French Riviera, while the statuary and facades of the city’s squares seem straight from Paris.
After World War I, Egypt became a British Protectorate. Our hotel, The Cecil, was a brass-knobbed, wood-pannelled 1920s pile steeped in past comforts – and great value outside the peak summer season. Reza showed us Smouha, once the gentle garden suburb where my mother lived. The houses have given way to a maze of apartment blocks, but in the city centre we sat in the pews of the Coptic-style Anglican church her family attended, and trod the original parquet floors of the French department store where my grandmother shopped.
The novelist EM Forster, stationed here during World War I, wrote that “the best way to see Alexandria is to wander aimlessly”. He was right – though the traffic is challenging these days. Horns blared constantly, tram bells rang, and the only way to cross roads was to launch ourselves into the stream and take each lane at a time. Alexandria’s taxis (as opposed to limousines) are yellow and black matchbox cars, hair-raising but invaluable when we’d strayed too far and needed a lift back.
We passed cafés of men sucking on hookahs, and antique shops brimming with Louis XVI chairs and gilded mirrors, abandoned when Nasser threw foreigners out after the Suez Crisis in 1956. The highlight of our wanderings was the market. Small sparkling stores sold silver and gold, and rainbow bolts of cloth. Alleys were piled high with produce: walls of stacked garlic, pyramids of cabbage; crates of aubergines, okra, tomatoes; baskets of eggs of every hue; live rabbits; fresh or dried fish; tripe and meat; sacks of pulses, rice and spices; heaps of succulent herbs. Metal stands held biblical clay pots of water to refresh passers-by. This bounty is reflected in Alexandria’s restaurants, where we gorged on spiced meats, flatbreads and rich dips, and drank chalky Egyptian wine.
Our favourite spot was outside Café Delices, where we watched Alexandria pass by in the spring sunshine over tea and French cream cakes – a nod to my grandfather. Arriving here ahead of his family after years of wartime rationing, he feasted on gâteaux and wrote to my grandmother that she’d have to put him on a diet when she arrived.
Although the city had changed for my mother, its essence was unaltered: a crossroads where Europe meets the East on every corner, and the ancient runs headlong into the contemporary. Family history had drawn us here, but we agreed that you don’t need a special reason to visit. Alexandria herself is reason enough.
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