Alexander’s descendants languish in the city that bears his name

Letter from Alexandria
Patrick Comerford

Lawrence 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.

This feature was first published in ‘The Irish Times’ on 20 April 2004

Legacy of an Irishwoman who loved a Greek writer

Letter from Crete
Patrick Comerford

Crete is the island of myth and literature. It is the island of the Minotaur, El Greco and Theodorakis. And it is the island of Nikos Kazantzakis, Greece’s most celebrated modern writer.

Kazantzakis was born in Iraklion in 1883. His works include translations of Homer, Aeschylus and Dante, the epic poem Odyssey, and the novels that earned him acclaim in the West, especially Zorba the Greek. By one vote, he lost the Nobel Prize for Literature to Albert Camus a few days before he died in 1957.

Manolis Chrysakis and his family are proud of their kinship with Kazantzakis. One balmy summer's evening with the Chrysakis family in Crete, Manolis’s uncle, the late Kostas Chrysakis, pored over old family photographs, postcards and letters, sharing childhood memories of his famous “Uncle Nikos”. Kostas treasured his photographs of his uncle's funeral, attended by older Cretans dressed in traditional island costumes, like Dirk Bogarde in Ill Met by Moonlight. The author’s grave is marked by a plain cross and the simple epitaph: “I hope for nothing, I fear nothing, I am free.”

In Report to Greco – an autobiographical novel edited by Eleni Kazantzakis and published four years after her husband’s death – Nikos Kazantzakis described falling in love with “an Irish girl” in the summer of 1902. She had arrived in Iraklion four years earlier as an English language teacher and they shared a love for music and poetry. “What joy when I began to saunter through English lyric poetry with this Irish girl! The language, its vowels and consonants, had become so many warbling birds,” he wrote.

Early one September morning, the couple climbed Mount Psilorítis, and he told a village priest they met that she was “the daughter of a pastor on a distant, verdant island”. As they talked, “the priest ... wagered that if the girl’s father had been with us, he would have converted him to Orthodoxy in one night.”

The pair separated the day before Kazantzakis left to study in Athens that autumn – he was 19 and she was 26. However, the Irish teacher’s identity remained a secret, even years later when he recounted the affair in Report to Greco. Kostas Chrysakis once told me his family knew about her but had no clues to her identity. The writer’s widow, Eleni, was aware of all her husband’s previous lovers and met many of them, but for most of her life she too never knew the identity of this Irish woman. Many researchers thought she was another Cretan myth, a romantic figure invented as a literary device by the writer himself.

Eleni’s goddaughter, Niki Stavrou of the Kazantzakis Foundation in Athens, also doubted whether she could ever establish her identify: “She seemed to me like a character drawn out of an Irish fairy tale, or at least an imagined dream-lover made up by the wishful imagination of a young author.” When Kazantzakis left Crete for Athens, his young Irish teacher “disappears a short while afterwards without leaving behind her the slightest trail. It sounded too magical to happen to anyone, even to a charmed spirit like Kazantzakis.” Now, however, new clues have identified this long-anonymous lover as Kathleen Forde, a rector’s daughter from Ireland. Niki’s father, Patroklos Stavrou, the adopted son of Eleni Kazantzakis, recently found notes this Irish woman sent to Kazantzakis and naming her as Kathleen Forde.

As he removed the notes tenderly from their protective wrapping, he said to his daughter: “If only we could find her!” At first, Niki’s search proved fruitless. “I am sure you can imagine how many Kathleen Fordes I found in Ireland.” Then an unexpected email arrived from Cathy Scaife in Western Canada, a descendant of Lewis Ogilby Forde, brother of a Kathleen Forde who was born in Ireland in 1876 and whose father was a Church of Ireland rector.

Kathleen left Crete soon after that tender summer, taking with her a secret she never revealed to her family. She followed her brothers to Canada before settling, around 1928 in California, where she may have found happiness in marriage to August Eberhardt. In an old family recipe box, Cathy Scaife found a recipe written by Kathleen and a little note with Christmas and New Year greetings to her brother Lewis and his wife Dorothy: “I find being married has done so much in settling me down and making me stick to things.” Comparing the handwriting with the notes found by Patroklos Stavrou, Greek police graphologists confirmed the handwriting was the same as that of Kazantzakis’s Kathleen.

Did Kathleen ever recover from her tempestuous affair with Nikos? “I can only imagine a young woman with a broken heart, having to hear people talk about him everywhere she went,” says Niki Stavrou. Kathleen died alone in a psychiatric hospital in Santa Cruz on October 8th, 1963. “Life can often outshine fiction in the most beautiful and tragic way,” says Niki.

For decades, Kathleen Forde’s identity had escaped me. Returning to the search, I found she was born on February 1st, 1876, in Kilcronaghan Rectory, Tobermore, Co Derry, the eldest daughter of Canon Hugh Forde (1847-1929). Unlike Kathleen’s Greek lover, Dr Forde never became a celebrated writer, but he wrote at least three books, travelled as far as Canada, Gibraltar and Morocco, was a senator of the University of Dublin, and had a doctorate in laws – the sort of priest who would have enjoyed theological debates with the village priest who was once host to Kathleen and Nikos.

When Eleni Kazantzakis died in Athens this February at the age of 102, she was brought to Crete to be buried beside her husband on the old Venetian walls of Iraklion, close to the spot where Kathleen Forde found love and romance on her Greek island generations before Shirley Valentine.

This feature was first published in ‘The Irish Times’ on 1 April 2004