132 GOURMET TRAVELLER
pace than their Cairo cousins. Founded on the
Mediterranean shores by Alexander himself, the
city is Egypt’s main port, a crossroads of culture that
remains more tuned to Europe and the Levant than
anywhere else in the country.
Delve into the Kom El Shoqafa, a 2nd-century
catacomb, where Greek and Roman dress and haircuts
mingle with Egyptian imagery in the carvings. On the
waterfront, meanwhile, vendors ply their wares along
the corniche: corn grilled over coals; a drink loaded with
chickpeas, Egypt’s answer to bubble tea, perhaps; simit,
the sesame-speckled love child of the bagel and the
pretzel, a gift from Istanbul. In one morning, roaming
with Esraa Sakr, a savvy local guide, I have ful medames,
the broad-bean stew eaten by most Egyptians for
breakfast, on a sandwich. I knock off a bowl of slippery
molokhia, the mallow leaf Egypt holds almost as dear as
the pyramids, in a soup kitchen under the 900-year-old
Attarine Mosque. I drink a pomegranate frappé opposite
Pompey’s Pillar. I wolf down a spicy bull-penis baguette
at Abdo Natana, and drink a carob juice a few blocks
from the Roman Amphitheatre.
Ask anyone from anywhere else in the country
what a visitor should eat in Alexandria, though, and
the answer is always the same: kebda Eskandarany.
Ask an Alexandrine where the best place is to try their
famed calf liver and chances are they’ll direct you to
El Falah. Its baguettes filled with slivers of sautéed
liver, garlic and hot peppers are a law unto themselves,
and everyone seems to chase them with a can of Pepsi.
Consider meandering over to the Bibliotheca
Alexandrina, as the sandwiches settle. The original was a
wonder of the world – home to tens if not hundreds of
thousands of scrolls. Fire is said to have destroyed much
of it during the late Roman Republic, and whatever was
left declined thereafter; the library today, opened in
2002, stands near the site of the original. It holds two
million books in 80 languages, with space for six million
more. Its reading room, which can accommodate
2,000 people, is the largest in the world. The library
is home to an internet archive that holds snapshots
of every page of every website since 1996, currently
clocking in at 3.7 petabytes of data. It also has a state-of-
the-art fire-suppression system, and might be the only
place in Egypt where you really can’t smoke.
Egypt has by no means given up all her old secrets.
It’s only been a few generations since the Rosetta Stone
allowed us to decipher hieroglyphic script – knowledge
lost to humankind since the 5th century. Only months
ago, a 4,000-year-old tomb was uncovered at Saqqara,
untouched and unlooted. The ancient and the
modern, the East and the West, the living and the
dead, the desert and the sea. The river links them
all. He who takes the water of the Nile, goes the
saying, is destined to taste its sweetness again.
The river flows on regardless.●