Benghazi

Benghazi introduced itself through its smell first: salt and diesel and something sweet I traced to a bakery a street back from the corniche that was pulling rings of sesame bread out of a wood-fired oven at seven in the morning. I had arrived by minibus from the east and the driver had dropped me at the seafront promenade, and I stood there for a few minutes adjusting to the light and to the particular color of the water. The Gulf of Sidra here is green — not the deep blue-green of the open Mediterranean but a luminous, shallow, tropical green that picks up the sky differently from everything I know. I have tried to explain this color to people who have not seen it and failed. In the late afternoon it turns amber at the margins and the transition is gradual enough to be almost imperceptible until you notice your photographs are a different color from the ones you took an hour before.

The corniche itself is where Benghazi happens in the evenings. Families spread across the wide promenade, vendors wheel carts of fried food and tea, teenagers walk in groups past the older couples who watch the sea. A man sold me fried pastries filled with tuna and egg and a hot sauce made from dried chilis and I ate them standing at his cart with the sea behind me and they were the best thing I ate in Libya. The cart vendor’s son brought out a small stool for me without being asked. These unremarkable kindnesses accumulate in Benghazi into something that feels significant, partly because the city has been through a decade that would justify a very different temperament.

The old Italian quarter, built during colonial occupation from 1911, is still the most architecturally coherent part of the central city. The buildings are not beautiful in themselves but they are substantial in the Italian Rationalist way — broad facades, arched ground floors, clean lines that the Mediterranean light reads well. The cathedral, now a mosque, retains its original dome and bell tower, the campanile standing over the surrounding buildings with a strange doubled identity. The souk al-Jareed — the old market — was a casualty of the post-2011 period and has been partially rebuilt, but some older sections retain the original Ottoman-era covered arcade structure, the carved wooden balconies and ironwork screens intact above stalls selling dried figs and ground spices and fabrics in colors that have not changed in centuries. I bought a small bag of ground cumin and a larger one of coriander seed that smelled of something warm and foreign I could not entirely place.

Benghazi carries the last decade visibly — buildings on the main boulevards show damage in varying states of repair, and there are gaps in the streetscape where structures have not yet been replaced. The people of the city move through this evidence with a pragmatism that is not indifference but something more considered, a decision to keep going. The evening light on the Gulf of Sidra turns the water from green to gold and the families on the corniche pause slightly, the same way people everywhere pause for a thing that is still beautiful even when the context has been difficult.

When to go: October through April. Benghazi’s coastal location makes it more humid in summer than the interior. November and December are ideal: clear, cool, the light on the water extraordinary in the early morning and at dusk. Avoid June through August for heat and humidity combined.