Nabil Mankarious

Appears in
The Real Greek
The Real Greek

By Tonia Buxton

Published 2016

  • About
Growing up in Alexandria, I enjoyed eating food that I had always believed to be inherently Egyptian cuisine. However, I have since come to realise that the dishes I was brought up on had their roots in Greece. As well as having our own version of moussaka (sans meat), stuffed vine leaves and baked pasta dishes were also commonplace on our table and are known to the Greeks as dolmades and pastitsio respectively.

Alexandria has a long and well-established connection with Greece ever since it was founded by Alexander the Great in 332 BC. There is still a thriving Greek community in Alexandria, and I have fond memories of playing football in the Greek youth centre that was across from where I lived in Camp Caesar. Occasionally, a few of the boys would invite me back to their homes afterwards for dinner with their families. To this day, whenever I visit Greece, I always seem to run into someone telling me of their relatives in Alexandria and asking if I know of them!