Ancient city rises amid Egypt resorts

MARINA, Egypt - Today, it's a sprawl of luxury vacation homes where Egypt's wealthy play on the white beaches of the Mediterranean coast. But 2,000 years ago, this was a thriving Greco-Roman port city, boasting villas of merchants grown rich on the wheat and olive trade.

The ancient city, known as Leukaspis or Antiphrae, was hidden for centuries after it was nearly wiped out by a fourth-century tsunami that devastated the region.

More recently, it was nearly buried under the modern resort of Marina in a development craze that turned this coast into the summer playground for Egypt's elite.

Nearly 25 years after its discovery, Egyptian authorities are preparing to open ancient Leukaspis' tombs, villas, and city streets to visitors - a rare example of a Classical-era city in a country better known for its pyramids and Pharaonic temples.

"Visitors can go to understand how people lived back then, how they built their graves, lived in villas or traded in the main agora [square]," said Ahmed Amin, the local inspector for the antiquities department.

The history of the two Marinas is inextricably linked. When Chinese engineers began cutting into the sandy coast to build the roads for the new resort in 1986, they struck the ancient tombs and houses of a town founded in the second century B.C.

About 200 acres were set aside for archaeology, while everywhere else along the coast up sprouted holiday villages for Egyptians escaping the stifling summer heat of the interior.

The ancient city yielded up its secrets to a team of Polish archaeologists excavating the site through the 1990s. A portrait emerged of a prosperous port town, with up to 15,000 residents at its height, exporting grains, livestock, wine, and olives to the rest of the Mediterranean.

Merchants lived in elegant two-story villas set along zigzagging streets with pillared courtyards flanked by living and prayer rooms.

Rainwater collected from roofs ran down special hollowed out pillars into channels under the floor leading to the family cisterns. Waste disappeared into a sophisticated sewer system.

Leukaspis was largely destroyed when a massive earthquake in A.D. 365 set off a tsunami wave that also devastated nearby Alexandria.

Today, the remains of the port are lost. In the late 1990s, an artificial lagoon was built, surrounded by summer homes for top government officials.

However, Egyptian government interest in the site rose in the last few years, part of a renewed focus on developing the country's Classical past.

Much still needs to be done to achieve the government's target to open the site by mid-September, as ancient fragments of pottery still litter the ground and bones lie open in their tombs.

But if old Marina is a success, then similar transformation could happen to a massive temple of Osiris just 30 miles away, where a Dominican archaeological team is searching for the burial place of the doomed Classical lovers, Anthony and Cleopatra.

These north coast ruins may also attract the attention of the visitors to the nearby El-Alamein battlefield and cemeteries for the World War II battle that Winston Churchill once called the turning point of the war.