But few of them could boast of local roots going back to Hellenistic times. Like the prosperous Greek merchant community in the Black Sea port of Odessa (whose members financed the Greek war of independence), or the venturesome Greeks who went to Panama at the end of the 19th century to make their fortunes servicing the newly-built Panama Canal, most of the Greeks in booming 19th-century Egypt were recent arrivals — enterprising people who came there from the Aegean islands, Anatolia, Cyprus and elsewhere in the Levant.

They were attracted to Egypt by the money to be made there in the 19th-century cotton boom and the Suez Canal, and their prosperity began and ended with the Albanian dynasty that ruled Egypt from the early 1800s until 1952.

When Nasser overthrew Egypt’s monarchy, in the name of Arab socialism, among the first revolutionary measures of the new regime was to dispossess and expel the non-Arab business and mercantile class — the Greeks among them — beginning with the wealthy shipping magnates and the owners of breweries and cigarette factories and ending with the shopkeepers.

In today’s Egypt, as in Burundi, Odessa, and too many other places, little now remains of once flourishing Greek communities, except memories, shuttered churches and schools… and (if we’re lucky) the last Greek deli.

(sorry I couldn’t resist)

A Greek entrepreneur for instance opened the first recording studio/pressing plant in Belgian Congo and can be credited for being at the origin of Congolese modern music. And really, only a Greek could have done in segregated Kinshasa. Belgians never set a foot outside the white area, while the Greeks shops were litterally at the border (but beyond the golf club.. that’s a story of its own).