On a recent trip to the desert, the sole European pupil among 11 students on the trip (aged between 14 and 18) worried he would be shunned by his Arabic-speaking classmates. When the English-speaking child was assigned the same tent as another pupil with whom he fought in school, teachers feared the worst. But the desert transformed their relationship positively.

“Each nationality is different from others and sometimes it’s hard,” said Walid Kombari, a Beirut-educated Palestinian teacher at the school. “But he got on with the kids better than we had expected - the desert achieved what the city could not.”

For Mandolios, the Greek community president, building this school with his own hands is payoff for not having abandoned Libya through the hard years of the embargo, unlike the majority of Greeks who jumped ship.

“We created a microcosm in the school in which people could live well,” he says. “The outside circumstances were not good, which is why no-one remained or bothered to invest in their surroundings.”

A fluent Arabic speaker originally born in Egypt, Mandolios represents a generation of the Middle East’s cosmopolitan multilingual Greeks now rapidly rushing towards extinction.

These Greeks were romantically captured in works of literature such as Olivia Manning’s “The Cairo Trilogy” and Lawrence Durrell’s “The Alexandria Quartet.” But their multicultural breeding grounds were drained by the storms of pan-Arabism and Islamist exclusionism that swept the Middle East in the post-colonial period.

Mandolios inserts a lit cigarette in the mouth of his long, cultured face, and parks the packet on the table against a no-frills Nokia turned to silent.

In forging this school, he seeks to leapfrog the damage inflicted on his heritage by a century of nationalism.

“We no longer live in homogenous ethnic states, we’re entering again the era of empires,” he says. “The trick now is to learn to get along.”

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