5-11-15. Alexandria, Egypt
I came here in search of two very different places: the metropolis that rivaled Rome in wealth and power, and the cosmopolitan city of Cavafy and Durrell. Neither is easy to find in the grimy modern version of Alexandria, which bustles, sprawls, and languishes around the remains of its august predecessors. The contrast of old and new was apparent from the moment I arrived in the dilapidated Neoclassical train station, and was driven home by an adjoining construction site, where fragments of massive ancient walls stood exposed in the foundation hole of a burgeoning parking garage. My hotel – the grand (and grandly named) Paradise le Metropole – proved to be another half-neglected relic. The room in which I write this has fourteen-foot ceilings, gilded trim, and finely trimmed wainscoting. A glance over the wrought iron balcony, however, reveals cracked and pitted stucco, and two grand boulevards lined with ill-maintained old buildings.
To visit the widely-scattered fragments of the Greco-Roman city, I hired the services of a mercenary cab driver, who chain smoked and pushed pedestrians off sidewalks as I tried to explain the location of the monuments I wanted to see. After a brief stop at the Qaitbey citadel, a medieval fortress built on the site (and with the stone) of the famous lighthouse of Alexandria, I asked the driver to bring me to Pompey’s pillar, the immense granite column (erected to bear a statue of the emperor Diocletian) that marks the site of the famous Serapeum. Once one of the largest and wealthiest sanctuaries in the Roman world, the Serapeum is now reduced to a few acres of rubble-strewn ground in the center of Alexandria’s impoverished port area; all my pictures of Pompey’s pillar have as their background lines of shoddy apartment blocks. Although little remains of the temple itself, which was demolished by a Christian mob in Late Antiquity, I was able to spend a pleasant fifteen minutes scrambling through the network of tunnels honeycombing the rock beneath its foundations.
Rejoining my driver, I proceeded to the famous catacombs of Kom al-Shoqafa. Besides their extent – they held an estimated 3000 bodies –the rooms and chambers that comprise this mortuary complex are remarkable for their imitations of vernacular architecture (that is, they were modelled after and preserve the design of Roman Alexandria’s long-lost houses). Apparently carved gradually from native stone between the first and fourth centuries – one room is supposed to have been cut specially for the victims of Caracalla’s famous massacre of the young men of Alexandria – they afford a rare and precious glimpse into the customs and beliefs of the ancient city’s eclectic population. The highlight is the so-called “Great Tomb,” a private burial chamber hollowed out and elaborately decorated for a wealthy Alexandrian and his wife. The well-preserved decorative program shows a fascinating blend of Egyptian and Greco-Roman religious and artistic traditions, epitomized by the guardian jackals, dressed as Roman soldiers, carved on either side of the door.
After paying my driver a reasonable portion of the exorbitant fare he demanded, I closed my tour of Roman Alexandria with the so-called Kom el-Dikka (mound of rubble), an excavated Late Antique neighborhood centered on a well-preserved odeon and a villa with beautiful mosaic floors.
It now after 4; and since all the museums were closed, I decided to spend the rest of the afternoon among the neoclassical buildings of colonial Alexandria. Whole streets of late nineteenth and early twentieth century structures, usually six or seven stories tall, formed grand and harmonious facades along most of the avenues in the old European quarter, lending the area an almost Viennese or Parisian feel. The effect was dampened, however, by a half-century of Egyptian accretions: wild spider webs of telephone and electrical wires, densely packed shop fronts, and about a half-inch of grime.
I concluded my walk in the monumental square fronted by the famous Hotel Cecil, centered on a lawn of windblown palms, and dominated by the view of Qaitbey across the harbor. I dashed across the busy Corniche (the seaside boulevard) to admire the view. A storm had blown up over the Mediterranean, framing the old fortress with a rack of black clouds; whitecaps, whipped by a stiff north wind, drove over the empty harbor to dash against the seawall. It was all very dramatic; but the breeze was chilly, and so I retreated to a nearby café. This proved to be another relic of colonial Alex, which served excellent soups and seafood. Since it was only 6 (most Egyptians take dinner around 9), I was the only diner, seated at a table facing the windy bay.
Thoroughly stuffed, I returned to my hotel, where I propped myself on the king-size bed, devoured the basket of complementary fruit, and emptied all the bath soap into my backpack. Opening the wooden door of my balcony, I admired a view of the bustling boulevards below. To my left, lighting darted and rain trailed from clouds massed over the twilit sea. After a long complacent look, I closed the shutters, propped myself on the opulent bed, and began to write.