Across the Middle East, from Cairo and Istanbul to Damascus and Tehran, abandoned churches, schools and social clubs, wrought in the neoclassical style that was in vogue during the 19th century, lie abandoned.

Few efforts are made to revive them by the surviving octogenarian patriarchies. Instead, fossilized boards of directors meet once or twice a year inside these crumbling buildings, for extended procrastination sessions. They are surrounded by thick walls, their plaster peeling off. The dim roar of 21st century traffic peters through as a reminder of besieging modernity.

For Benghazi, a dusty Mediterranean city just 200 kilometers south of the Greek island of Crete, its Greek community reached the point of extinction in the 1980s, as an international embargo was slapped on Gadhafi’s Libya for its alleged role in the bombing of a Pan Am flight over Scotland.

Flocks of Greek businessmen departed as opportunities dried up. After a century of commercial back and forth that mirrored millennia of trade in this corner of the Mediterranean, socialist policies and a crippling bar on trade with the outside world dwindled a once-thriving community to a few families. 2004 was the last year the Greek community school functioned. That year, six teachers taught the two remaining students.

“In the name of maintaining Greekness we led ourselves into seclusion, even though Greece is in the European Union and most Greeks no longer live in homogenous ethnic states,” said Kanakis Mandolios, who is the president of Benghazi’s Greek community. “So we decided to create here in Libya a multicultural community of the type the EU is striving to replicate.”

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