THE CITY, HALF-IMAGINED (yet wholly real), begins and ends in us, roots lodged in our memory Have I not said enough about Alexandria?”

Lawrence Durrell, one of the 20th century’s greatest writers, might have thought he exhausted every word possible on his adopted city after penning his masterpiece The Alexandria Quartet, but native Alexandrians (and self-professed Alexandriaphiles) would beg to differ. For them, no amount of purple prose can do justice to Egypt’s jewel, and if you let them, they will go on endlessly about her sea, her beaches, her breeze, her streets, her culture, her history and, of course, her people.

No other city in Egypt is as beloved by its inhabitants as is Alexandria. When Alexandrians gush about the “Bride of the Mediterranean,” their eyes light up with adoration and their faces unconsciously break into smiles. Alexandria does have the air of a beautiful bride on her wedding day: Elegant, proud, playful but, most of all, hopeful. Hopeful because as Cairo grows more crowded, noisier and even uglier, the nation’s second city is in the midst of a makeover of both body and soul that promises to restore to it its former glory.

Even so, with close to four million inhabitants, the Mediterranean’s largest urban center remains plagued by many of the problems common to the rest of the country from housing shortages and slacking tourism to an increasingly endangered heritage that will continue to test the city that sees itself as “Egypt’s Paris” for many years to come.

The rise before the fall

According to Alexandrians, their city’s renaissance began in earnest when Gen. Mohamed Abd El-Salam El-Mahgoub was appointed governor in 1997. El-Mahgoub immediately launched an ambitious beautification and cleanliness project that expanded the Corniche from a narrow, two-lane road to a sweeping multi-lane boulevard complete with palm trees, faux gas lanterns and a completely redone pedestrian walkway.

Public works crews were soon modeling public squares, building Stanley Bridge and renewing the façades of sea-front buildings. Today, there are even plans to expand Alexandria’s administrative borders by annexing chunks of neighboring Marsa Matruh and Beheira.

But El-Mahgoub’s tenure hasn’t only been bulldozers, cement and tree-planting campaigns. His reign has also seen the metamorphosis of the Sayyid Darwish Theatre into the Alexandria Opera House; the opening of a new state-of-the-art National Museum; the founding of l’Université Leopold Senghor, the world’s first international Francophone university; and, most importantly, the inauguration of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in 2002.

(For more on the inauguration of the Bibliotheca, see Egypt Today’s April 2002 issue, the official magazine of the inauguration.)

Alexandrians call Mahgoub the most proactive governor the city has seen and let out a collective sigh of relief when he retained his post in the recent shake-up of the nation’s governors that followed the July cabinet shuffle.

After all, if it ain’t broke, why fix it?

Still, Alexandria’s current administration has a lot to live up to. Not so long ago, from the late 19th century through the early 1950s, Alexandria was a cosmopolitan city like few others. Greeks, Italians, French, English, Levantines and Armenians lived side-by-side with native Egyptians. Some historians estimate that foreign minorities made up a full one-third of the city’s population, imparting a diversity that helped transform it into an open, tolerant metropolis that attracted some of the world’s greatest writers names such as E.M. Forster and Durrell.

Styling itself the “pearl of the Mediterranean,” the bustling port city gave Egypt its first newspaper, Al-Ahram, and its first feature film, Layla.

Then came the 1952 revolution, and things quickly went from good to bad to worse.

“For many years [after the revolution], this city was neglected. It was quite forgotten, and lost not only its economic power, but also its social and cultural power,” laments architect Muhammad Awad, a man hailed by many as Alexandria’s most dedicated historian. “Alexandria shifted from being a bourgeois, white-collar elitist society to a working-class city, with all the social implications such an economic shift brings.”

Awad squarely blames Nasserism for the port city’s changing fortunes.

“The policies of decolonization meant an exodus of the Europeans and the cosmopolitans, and the centralization policies of the early phases of the revolution meant that all power was taken to Cairo,” says Awad, who lectures regularly at the University of Alexandria. “The sequestrations of the 1960s meant not only the exodus of the foreigners, but also the closing down of many of the activities related to foreign trade and industry or their being turned into state-owned enterprises.”

Picking up the timeline, Wassim Mohie El-Din, one of Alexandria’s biggest tourism players, adds that the 1980s and early 1990s marked the continuing “deterioration” of Alexandria, this time due to provincial, rather than national, policies.

“The administrative units of the governorate neglected Alexandria during this time due to problems between the governor and the opposition media, as well as disputes between him and local businessmen,” claims Mohie El-Din, who entered the tourism sector in 1969. “So there was a period of stagnation, with no improvement whatsoever and no new investment.

“Alexandria became a city of emigrants.”

Challenging Cairo

Fast-forward to 2004 and things are looking a lot better for the city by the sea, a fact even die-hard Cairo loyalists will admit, however grudgingly. Much of the sudden shine in the city’s image owes to its new role as a center of intellectual and cultural life.

Ask an Alexandrian what was the best thing to happen to their city of late, and they answer without hesitation: The Library. Inaugurated by President Mubarak himself in the presence of a dozen other heads of state, the multi-million dollar Bibliotheca Alexandrina is viewed by many as the panacea for all of the city’s problems.

It certainly has a good role model in the form of its much, much older brother. Carl Sagan, the renowned American astrophysicist, had this to say about the ancient Library of Alexandria: “This legendary library was the mind and glory of the greatest city on earth, and was the first center for scientific research in the history of the world. Here scientific studies reached adulthood. Here genius flourished. Here in the Library of Alexandria were the first serious trials to understand the world.”

It’s a tough act to follow, but Ismail Serageldin, the director of the Bibliotheca, believes Alexandria’s biggest cultural investment to date will rise up to the challenge.

“We are not a library we are a vast cultural enterprise,” says Serageldin, who quit his post as vice-president of the World Bank to take up the reins at the Bibliotheca. “We have seven research institutes, six art galleries, six specialized libraries, three museums, a planetarium and exploratium. There is a vast set of activities, from research to dance, that goes on here. Collectively, we have no parallel in the world.”

By acting as “Egypt’s window on the world, and the world’s window on Egypt,” Serageldin hopes the Bibliotheca will revive the city’s ancient reputation as a center of learning and knowledge and give Cairo a run for its money.

“We can make Alexandria seen as a global center of science and culture. Yes, of course, Cairo will remain the dominant force, but this shouldn’t prevent Alexandria from having its own identity,” he continues. “If you look at New York and Boston, for example, they are very close to each other, but each has its own strengths and identity; there is no reason to assume that the very powerful center of New York should overshadow Boston.”

For tourism tycoon Mohie El-Din, who operates two Alexandrian landmarks, the San Giovanni and Salamlek hotels, the library’s state-of-the-art facilities have the potential to be a golden-egg laying goose for the local tourism industry, especially when it comes to conference tourism.

“Everything is directed to Cairo, but Cairo can’t sustain much more, really. Like when a conference comes to Egypt during the winter, why convene it in Cairo?” Mohie El-Din asks. “Organizers should bring it to Alexandria instead, which is prettier, cheaper and has all the necessary facilities at the library.”

In fact, Mohie El-Din adds, the government should consider Alexandria the country’s official “conference city.”

“This would make a huge difference,” he says. “We would be working all winter and Alexandria’s beautiful face would receive international exposure. Alexandria has been one of the greatest cities in the world since antiquity; we have to make that work to our benefit.”

Ancient discoveries

Whether it’s conferences, culture or just plain sun and surf, Alex’s leading figures say the future of the city lies in promoting and developing the tourism sector. In that sense, the second city is no different from any other in Egypt.

While Alexandria has long been a breezy haven for thousands of Cairenes escaping the suffocating summer heat, foreign tourists usually visit Alex for only a day, taking the evening bus back to Cairo. In 1997, for example, Alexandria took in a paltry 700,000 tourist nights compared to Cairo’s four million. The proportion has hardly risen since, but insiders hope that the city’s newest attractions will give tourism a shot in the arm.

One of these attractions is the discovery of monuments dating as far back as the third century BC both on land and below the blue-green waters of Alexandria’s harbor. Jean-Yves Empereur, the renowned French archaeologist, heads the Centre d’etudes Alexandrines, which he founded back in 1990. Empereur and his team are responsible for some of the most important discoveries in Alexandria in recent years, including what they claim are remnants of the Pharos Lighthouse, the Seventh Wonder of the ancient world.

“For an archaeologist, it is a dream to live in Alexandria. Alexandria was the most magnificent and brilliant city of the ancient world,” says Empereur, who has written a dozen books on his adopted city. “There is an incomparable history less than 12 meters below our feet. It is the only huge modern city which was at the same a huge ancient city, so every time you dig to build something, you will see the past below you.”

Ironically, ancient Alexandria was only brought to light when modern Alexandria was struck by a construction boom in the early 1990s. The demolition of old buildings to make way for new ones gave archaeological teams like Empereur’s the opportunity to excavate underground on the construction sites.

“We couldn’t excavate everywhere of course, but in the spots where we could, we discovered some very new things about ancient Alexandria,” says Empereur. “I think that after more than 15 years of work we can say that we now have a completely new idea about ancient Alexandria and that we are able to rewrite a more accurate history of it.”

Alexandrians hope these new discoveries will attract more cultural tourists to the city, and there are plans to build an underwater archeological museum, where visitors can don diving gear and swim between ancient monuments and statues a few meters below the harbor’s waves.

“We are attracting on a new type of tourist. It is not like in the Red Sea, where people go primarily for the beach and the marine life. If you come here, it is because you are interested in history, in things like Alexander the Great, the lighthouse, the library,” claims Empereur, who in 1998 organized an exhibition on Alexandria in Paris that attracted more than half a million visitors. “Tourists who come here are generally more educated and come to Alexandria especially, not just as part of a tour.”

Serageldin agrees that Alexandria’s newfound cultural attractions will work wonders in attracting more foreign visitors. “There will be a new Alexandria, and this new Alexandria will change the touristic map of Egypt,” he claims. “Alexandria has been absent from the tourist map for a long time now, but I think this new vision of the city as a center of learning, a cosmopolitan place full of history, will make it a destination to which people will come for reasons above and beyond the sandy beaches. Alexandria will reclaim a part of it history.”

Alexandria’s real estate boom has been a double-edged sword, though, for both archaeologists and tourism players. While it has afforded them the opportunity to reclaim pieces of Alexandria’s ancient history, it has also made certain that much of that history is lost forever to modern prosperity.

“Rescue archaeology is very stressful and quite different from traditional archaeology,” explains Empereur. “Our Polish colleagues, for example, have been working in the Greco-Roman theater since 1960, and the site is completely protected. We, on the other hand, sometimes have only a few months or even weeks to go and see what we can save due to pressure from developers who want us to finish quickly so they can go on with their construction projects. So we don’t always get to salvage everything we should.”

(For more on rescue archaeology in Alexandria and elsewhere in Egypt, see “What Lies Beneath,” December 2003, page 92.)

Empereur says the city has to tread carefully between the need for new housing and infrastructure and the duty to preserve its historical heritage for future generations: “People want new houses, new bridges and new roads, but we also have to respect the patrimony of this city because it is an economic asset in that it attracts tourists.

“Finding and maintaining this balance is very difficult.”

Striking a balance

No one knows that more than Awad, one of the most iconic of the city’s lovers. Aside from being an internationally acclaimed architect and chairman of the Alexandria-Mediterranean Studies Center, Awad is the founder of the Alexandria Preservation Trust, an NGO dedicated to documenting and protecting the city’s physical heritage.

For Awad, the city’s track record in the quest for a happy balance between past and present has been less than encouraging.

“There is no planning going on. We don’t really have a ‘planning’ authority what we have is merely an implementer,” claims Awad. “When the Corniche was widened, for example, they destroyed some important archaeological sites and left no beaches. Can you imagine? We have one of the longest corniches in the world, yet there are 25 kilometers of it with no sand beaches and Alexandria used to be famous for its beaches.

“Now they are planning to build private clubs for syndicates [along the shore], which is another disaster,” he continues. “The environment has been assaulted in many ways and the city is still witnessing a lot of chaos and disorder.”

Awad acknowledges, however, that authorities have recently done a better job on the conservation front, adding that Alexandria is the only city in Egypt with a complete list of buildings that need to be preserved, thanks largely to his own efforts. (The Heritage List contains some 1,700-plus buildings from all time periods.)

While Awad and others laud the governorate’s efforts to make Alexandria a better, and certainly more beautiful, place to live, they add that only the surface has been scratched so far.

“The Corniche has been widened, the public squares redone, the road networks expanded and some inner-city slums removed. Okay, this is all important, but it is not enough,” says Awad. “These changes are all cosmetic. They don’t go deep enough in addressing the more urgent needs of employment, better access to better education, and the enforcement of law and order.”

The growth of informal squatter settlements on the outskirts of the city, marked by degradation and extreme poverty, is a new urban phenomenon that has yet to be dealt with, experts say. In fact, more than one in three Alexandrians live in shantytowns within city limits. Another problem: the densification of the urban context, where picturesque villas and green gardens are being sacrificed at alarming speed to make for high-rise apartment blocks.

Population density in relatively well-to-do areas like San Stefano has reached a startling 211 persons per feddan, versus the maximum 150:1 ratio allowed by law. Adding insult to injury, “these new buildings are usually devoid of any cultural value, and certainly not suitable for our climate and environment,” says the veteran architect.

But whatever their city’s problems, Alexandrians are confident the future has only good in store for them.

“I am very optimistic about the future of Alexandria, very optimistic,” says Mohie El-Din. “We have everything we need to succeed as a city economically, politically and culturally. But to live up to our potential, government decision makers need to understand how Alexandria can be useful to them and how they can be useful to Alexandria.”

Alexandria is already one of the country’s economic powerhouses, acting as the biggest contributor to national wealth and productivity after Cairo, with a full 40 percent of Egyptian industries calling it home and 80 percent of all foreign trade coming in via its two ports, he points out.

The most important thing is to keep on working and hoping for the better. Living with a sense of optimism is part and parcel of Alexandria, says Mohie El-din:

“When you stand on the Corniche in Alexandria and look out to the sea, you don’t see any end to it. It makes you feel life has limitless possibilities, that you can do anything you want. It allows you to have never-ending hope.”  et