Letter from Alexandria Patrick ComerfordLawrence Durrell once described Alexandria as "a broken-down version of Naples", and Michael Palin was more disparaging when he said it felt like "Cannes with acne". But, despite the shortage of seafront tavernas and bars, a stroll along the Corniche can leave the visitor in no doubt that this is a Mediterranean city, full of mystery, myth and enchantment.
This is the city of Alexander the Great and of Cleopatra, of the Pharos Lighthouse, once one of the seven wonders of the Ancient World, and of the greatest library of the classical world. Alexandria is at the crossroads of history, the meeting place of Africa, Asia and Europe - the Ptolemies, Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, Napoleon, Montgomery, King Farouk, and even the al-Fayed brothers, all marched through this city in their own ways.
Its Muslim conqueror Amr described a city of "4,000 palaces, 4,000 baths, 1,200 greengrocers and 40,000 Jews". But Alexandria has also been described as the "city of the literary cross-references".
It is better known in the English-speaking world through its literature and writers than through its minarets and tourist sites. The guest list at the Hotel Cecil includes Somerset Maugham, Noel Coward and Winston Churchill. But this too is the city where Durrell wrote The Dark Labyrinth and The Alexandria Quartet, and where E.M. Forster worked on A Passage to India, having moved here after A Room with a View and Howard's End. Durrell based his character Balthazar on Constantine Cavafy, and Forster introduced the English-speaking world to Alexandria's greatest modern poet.
Cavafy (1863-1933) lived most of his life in Alexandria, working as a clerk in the Ministry of Public Works in a cramped office above the Trianon patisserie.
Although he was gay, he could joke that there was a brothel below his apartment in the narrow alley. The Patriarchal Monastery of Saint Sava can still be seen from his balcony, and there was a hospital at the end of the street. "Where could I live better?" he once asked. "Below, the brothel caters for the flesh. And there is the church which forgives sins. And there is the hospital where we die."
Cavafy died of throat cancer from drinking and was buried in the Greek cemetery in Shatby.
Today, his apartment houses the Cavafy Museum. The collection includes family memorabilia, drawings and photographs, the poet's personal possessions, his icons, his bed and the desk where he wrote Waiting for the Barbarians (1904), The City (1910) and Ithaki (1911) and an exhibition of translations of his work into dozens of languages, including English versions by W.H. Auden and the Irish poet Desmond O'Grady.
Cavafy's poetry encapsulated the lives of Alexandria's vibrant Greek community a century ago, with the city inspiring many of his poems, including The City and The god abandons Antony (1911).
For thousands of years there have been Greeks in Alexandria. The city takes its very name from the greatest Greek hero of all, Alexander the Great, known to Egyptians today as Iskander Akbar. The city's Greek Orthodox community trace the Church of Alexandria back to Saint Mark the Evangelist, who made his first convert here in AD 45.
The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria has survived through the centuries, despite schisms, heresies, turmoil and the arrival of Islam.
Indeed, the Muslims came to respect the prophets and saints of their Greek Orthodox neighbours: many Muslims continue to believe the Mosque of Nabi Daniel, featured in Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, is built on the grave of the Old Testament prophet; and the Attarine Mosque is built on the site of a church named after the champion of orthodoxy, Athanasius - Napoleon even believed he found the sarcophagus of Alexander the Great here.
The Suez Crisis in 1954 dealt a severe blow to Alexandria's Greek community. Seen as foreigners, despite their presence in the city for millennia, many accepted the offer from the Greek government to leave what Cavafy called "this small corner" to "find a new country . . . another shore".
The Greeks of the city numbered 300,000 half a century ago; today they are no more than 1,000. The Greek coffee shops, tavernas and bars littered around Alexandria 50 years ago have all but disappeared, and the notable exceptions are no longer in Greek hands. The dark-panelled Pastroudis, a coffee shop founded by Greeks in 1923 and immortalised by Durrell and Cavafy, had become a sad parody of itself before it closed recently.
Havana, a nearby bar, was difficult to find even before its recent closure: there was no sign on the door, and the owner, Nagy, whose father bought it from departing Greeks in 1954, maintained the old rules: "No entry in pyjamas, and no spitting on the floor."
Nearby, Trianon, a coffee shop favoured by Cavafy when he worked in the offices above, is now a fashionable haunt for Egyptian lovers. But Athenios, once the grandest of the coffee houses, has been reduced to a cake shop and has gaping holes in the classical motifs and mirrors of its art nouveau decor.
Alexander the Great is about to become a popular hero once again with two epic movies. But the fate of his descendants in the city he named is a sad tale.
Having survived so much turmoil, division, persecution and revolution, the Greek community in Egypt's second city is now in such rapid decline that within two generations Alexandria may be without a Greek community for the first time since 332 BC.