The writer Constantine Cavafy was largely unpublished in his lifetime, but was revered by artists. His archive and Alexandrian home are now on show for the first time
It was the backdrop to a literary world of the lost Levant. Away from the sea, on a narrow street in the old Greek quarter of Alexandria, 10 Rue Lepsius was the home and creative sanctuary of Constantine Cavafy.
For 26 years, it was here that the poet, a bureaucrat in British-run colonial Egypt, held court, treating writers such as EM Forster to long candle-lit nights of talk over liquors and what the English novelist later recalled as “small bits of bread and cheese”.
Continue reading…The writer Constantine Cavafy was largely unpublished in his lifetime, but was revered by artists. His archive and Alexandrian home are now on show for the first timeIt was the backdrop to a literary world of the lost Levant. Away from the sea, on a narrow street in the old Greek quarter of Alexandria, 10 Rue Lepsius was the home and creative sanctuary of Constantine Cavafy.For 26 years, it was here that the poet, a bureaucrat in British-run colonial Egypt, held court, treating writers such as EM Forster to long candle-lit nights of talk over liquors and what the English novelist later recalled as “small bits of bread and cheese”. Continue reading…