Sights in Alexandria
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Catacombs of Kom ash-Shuqqafa (Kom ash-Shuqqafa)
About five minutes' walk south of Pompey's Pillar are the Catacombs of Kom ash-Shuqqafa (Kom ash-Shuqqafa). Discovered accidentally in 1900 when a donkey disappeared through the ground, these catacombs are the largest known Roman burial site in Egypt. This impressive feat of engineering was one of the last major works of construction dedicated to the religion of ancient Egypt.
Demonstrating Alexandria's hallmark fusion of Pharaonic and Greek styles, the architects used a Graeco-Roman approach in their construction efforts. The catacombs consist of three tiers of tombs and chambers cut into bedrock to a depth of 35m. The bottom level, some 20m below street level, is floode…
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Temple of Serapeum
The Temple of Serapeum is a magnificent structure that stood here in ancient times. It had 100 steps leading past the living quarters of the priests to the great temple of Serapis, the man-made god of Alexandria . Also here was the 'daughter library', the second great library of Alexandria, which was said to have contained copies and overflow of texts held in the Great Library of Alexandria, the Mouseion library.
Unlike at the Great Library, these rolls could be consulted by anyone using the temple, making it one of the most important intellectual and religious centres in the Mediterranean. In AD 391 Christians launched a final assault on pagan intellectuals and destroyed…
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Alexandria National Museum
The excellent Alexandria National Museum sets new benchmarks for summing up Alexandria’s past. With a small, thoughtfully selected and well-labelled collection singled out from Alexandria’s other museums, it does a sterling job of relating the city’s history from antiquity until the modern period. Housed in a beautifully restored Italianate villa, it stocks several thousand years of Alexandrian history, arranged chronologically over three cryogenically air-conditioned floors.
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House of Amasyali
One of the most impressive of all Rosetta's fine buildings is the House of Amasyali, one of two restored houses on al-Anira Feriel. The façade here is one of the most impressive in Rosetta, with beautiful small lantern lights and vast expanses of mashrabiyya screens, which circulate cool breezes around the house. Although inside it's devoid of furniture - as are all the buildings - it's still possible to get a clear idea of how the house worked.
A series of rough stone chambers, which would have been used for storage, make up the ground floor. The 1st floor is for the men. One of the rooms here is a reception room, where guests would have been entertained by groups of m…
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Montazah Palace Gardens
Khedive Abbas Hilmy (1892-1914) built Montazah as his summer palace, a refuge when Cairo became too hot. Sited on a rocky bluff overlooking the sea, it's designed in a pseudo-Moorish style, which has been given a Florentine twist with the addition of a tower modelled on one at the Palazzo Vecchio. Now used by Egypt's president, the palace is off limits to the public but the surrounding lush groves and Montazah Palace Gardens, planted with pine and palms, are accessible.
They're popular with courting couples and picnicking locals.There's also an attractive sandy cove here with a semiprivate beach (around £E10 to use it, although it's not particularly clean), and an eccentr…
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Ship Yards
While steel and fibreglass construction techniques dominate the modern shipbuilding industry, more traditional methods of construction remain in Alexandria. At the Ship Yards at the northern end of Anfushi, yachts are still constructed by hand and made entirely from wood. Along this stretch of coast lie dozens of yachts in various stages of completion, many with the slick modern designs more reminiscent of their fibreglass cousins.
Here, skeletal wooden hulls of three-storey vessels tower over the sand like beached dinosaur exhibits and dozens of smaller craft compete with them for beach space. In between curving hulls, small shacks line the beach housing building materia…
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Villa Ambron
Committed fans of Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet might like to search out the Villa Ambron where Durrell lived and wrote during the last two years of the war. Gilda Ambron, whose name appeared in the Quartet's 'Balthazar', painted with her mother in a studio in the garden, shared with their neighbour Clea Badaro, who provided inspiration for the character of Clea in the Quartet.
Durrell's room was on top of an octagonal tower in the garden, though sadly the place has deteriorated badly over the past couple of decades. If you're in for a pilgrimage anyway, from Misr train station walk southeast down Sharia Moharrem Bey, then at the little square at the end turn left…
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Mamoura Beach
There are plenty of public and private beaches along Alexandria's waterfront, but the ones between the Eastern Harbour and Montazah are often crowded and very grubby. Mamoura Beach , is slightly better - it even has a few small waves rolling in. The local authorities are trying to keep this beach suburb exclusive by charging everyone who enters the area around £E5; but then there's a further fee of around £E20 to get onto the sand.
Women should note that even here modesty prevails and we recommend covering up when swimming - wear a baggy T-shirt and shorts over your swimsuit. To get here jump in an Abu Qir-bound microbus at Midan al-Gomhuriyya - make sure that the drive…
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Pompey’s Pillar
The massive 30m column that looms over the debris of the glorious ancient settlement of Rhakotis, the original township from which Alexandria grew, is known as Pompey’s Pillar. For centuries the column, hewn from red Aswan granite, has been one of the city’s prime sights, a single, tapered shaft, 2.7m at its base and capped by a fine Corinthian capital. The column was named by travellers who remembered the murder of the Roman general Pompey by Cleopatra’s brother, but an inscription on the base (presumably once covered with rubble) announces that it was erected in AD 291 to support a statue of the emperor Diocletian.
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Kom Ash-Shuqqafa
Discovered accidentally in 1900 when a donkey disappeared through the ground, these catacombs are the largest known Roman burial site in Egypt. This impressive feat of engineering was one of the last major works of construction dedicated to the religion of ancient Egypt. Demonstrating Alexandria’s hallmark fusion of Pharaonic and Greek styles, the architects used a Graeco-Roman approach in their construction efforts. The catacombs consist of three tiers of tombs and chambers cut into bedrock to a depth of 35m. The bottom level, some 20m below street level, is flooded and inaccessible but the areas above are impressive enough on their own.
reviewed
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Hammam Azouz
One of the most extraordinary buildings in Rosetta has to be the Hammam Azouz, a 19th-century bathhouse. Just south of the city centre, this restored ode to Ottoman ablution has a fine marble interior with elaborately carved wooden beams and trimmings. Several bathing rooms encircle the main, fountain-centred bath room, and tall domed ceilings crown each chamber.
Tiny round holes in the domes let in piercing shafts of light (and would have let out steam), with some still covered in colourful stained glass that further bathes the place in a faint rainbow of surreal colours. Tickets for the bathhouse are available at the House of Amasyali.
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Roman Amphitheatre
While the 13 white-marble terraces of the only Roman Amphitheatre in Egypt may not be impressive in scale, they remain a superbly preserved ode to the days of the centurion. This site was discovered when foundations were being laid for an apartment building on a site known unceremoniously as Kom al-Dikka (Mound of Rubble). Excavations continue to uncover more in the area; in early 2010 the ruins of a Ptolemaic-era temple were uncovered along with statues of gods and goddesses, including a number of the cat goddess Bastet.
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Fort of Qaitbey
About 5km north of Rosetta along the Nile is the Fort of Qaitbey, built in 1479 (just before the sultan’s fort in Alexandria) to guard the mouth of the Nile 6km further on. It was here that the famous Rosetta Stone was found, and there’s a copy inside the fort. The mouth of the Nile is visible from atop the walls. Boats depart from the Corniche near the Museum Garden and make the trip to the fort for around E£50 to E£60 per person return (1½ hours), or you can hire a taxi to take you.
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House of Abu Shaheen
The House of Abu Shaheen, or Mill House has a reconstructed mill on the ground floor, featuring enormous wooden beams and planks. You can actually see the gears and teeth rotate, which 200 years ago would have been pushed in an endless circle by a bored draught animal. In the courtyard, the roof of the stables is supported by granite columns with Graeco-Roman capitals. Tickets bought here are good for all of the open monuments in the town centre.
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Terbana Mosque
The beautiful little Terbana Mosque stands at the junction of Sharia Fransa and Souq al-Kharateen. This entire quarter, known as Gumruk, stands on land that was underwater in the Middle Ages. Late-17th-century builders managed to incorporate bits of ancient Alexandria in the mosque's structure, reusing two classical columns to support the minaret. The red-and-black painted brickwork on the façade is typical of the Delta-style architecture.
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Necropolis of Anfushi
If you're keen on tombs, and who isn't, check out the Necropolis of Anfushi, with five tombs dating back to the 2nd and 1st centuries BC. The two principal tombs contain some faded wall decoration intended to imitate marble and alabaster. Though not as eloquent as the catacombs of Kom ash-Shuqqafa, the Anfushi tombs reiterate the way the Greeks of Alexandria assimilated Egyptian beliefs into their funerary practices.
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synagogue
Alexandria's fabulous Italian-built synagogue was erected over a century ago, and served a thriving, wealthy, cosmopolitan Jewish community of about 15,000. Since the wars with Israel and the 1956 Suez crisis, that community has dwindled so that now when the synagogue opens each Shabbat, it rarely has the necessary 10 men to hold a service. Casual visitors are not usually admitted.
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Chatby Necropolis
The Chatby Necropolis is considered to be the oldest necropolis in Alexandria. Discovered in 1904, the burials here date from the 4th century BC, soon after the city's founding, and belong to the earliest generations of Alexandrians. Appropriately, if current archaeological thinking is correct, Alexander the Great may also have been interred here at one time.
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Cavafy Museum
Cavafy's flat is now preserved as the Cavafy Museum, with two of the six rooms arranged as Cavafy kept them. Editions of the poet’s publications and photocopies of his manuscripts, notebooks and correspondence lie spread out on tables throughout the rooms. Note that the museum is on a 2nd-floor walk-up and there are no elevators.
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Midan Tahrir
Midan Tahrir was laid out in 1830 as the centrepiece of Mohammed Ali's new look: Alexandria goes to Europe. The impressive statue on a plinth at the centre of the midan is Mohammed Ali on horseback. A recent clean up has done wonders to accentuate the fine architecture of the square's surrounding buildings.
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Ras at-Tin Palace
Just beyond the Necropolis of Anfushi is the Ras at-Tin Palace, a centre of power during the first half of the 19th century when Mohammed Ali summered here. It's from here that King Farouk boarded his yacht and departed from Egypt after abdicating on 26 July 1956. It's now closed to the public.
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Planetarium
The Planetarium is a futuristic neon-lit sphere looming on the plaza like a mini Death Star from Star Wars. It shows 3-D films on a rotating schedule (available on the library website), and has an Exploratorium as well as the aforementioned History of Science Museum.
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Antiquities Museum
In the Alexandria library's basement is the Antiquities Museum, containing some overspill from the Graeco-Roman Museum, including a fine Roman mosaic of a dog discovered when the foundations of the library were dug. Free high-tech PDA guides are available in English, Arabic and French.
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Bibliotheca Alexandrina
Opened in 2002, this impressive piece of modern architecture is a deliberate attempt to rekindle the brilliance of the original centre of learning and culture. The complex has become one of Egypt’s major cultural venues and a stage for numerous international performers.
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Pharmacie Suisse
The area around Midan Ramla is full of mini time capsules of the city's cosmopolitan past - take a look in the Pharmacie Suisse, with its beautiful dark wood and glass cabinets painted with skull and crossbones and the warning 'substances toxique'.
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