The Greeks of Alexandria and the Patisseries They Built

How Alexandria's Greek community shaped the city's café culture from the 1900s onward, why so many of its patisseries were Greek-owned, and what remains of that world today.

Ask an older Alexandrian where to buy a cake for a wedding and the answer, for most of the twentieth century, was a Greek name. The city's patisserie culture was built by its Greek community, and Délices is one of the few houses from that world still run by the family that founded it.

A community of a hundred thousand

In the early 1900s Alexandria held one of the largest Greek communities outside Greece, with its own schools, hospitals, churches, newspapers and clubs. Greeks worked across the city's economy, but two trades became almost a signature: grocery and confectionery. A Greek confectioner trained in the French tradition could sell to every community at once, Greek sweets for one holiday, French patisserie for another, and Egyptian desserts for the rest of the year.

Ramleh Station, 1907

Cleovoulos Moustakas began trading in 1907 near Ramleh Station, the tram terminus on the Corniche where the city's cosmopolitan life concentrated. His shop was a bakery, a chocolaterie and a salon de thé in one. In 1922 the business was formally established under a new name. A French visitor, tasting the pastries, is said to have called them une merveille de délices, a marvel of delights, and the name stayed.

After 1952

The revolution of 1952 and the nationalisations that followed changed Alexandria. Many Greek families left in the late 1950s and 1960s, and most of the Greek-owned shops closed or changed hands. Délices did not. The same family kept the counter, the recipes and the customers, and the café became part of Alexandrian life for everyone: coffee after a service at the Greek church, special pastries at Christmas and Easter, a wicker chair outside to watch the street.

A patisserie is a small institution. It outlives the people who opened it only if someone chooses to keep it.

What remains

Alexandria's Greek community today is a few hundred people, but its cafés are still where the city goes to feel like itself. If you want to taste that history, order a Greek coffee and a cassata at Délices, made to a recipe from the 1920s, and look at the photographs on the wall.