Al-Ahram Weekly 6 - 12 January 2000 Issue No. 463
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

Shards of evidence Bottle-throwing, crockery-smashing proclivities provide a cutting-edge, if prickly, premise for speaking of an Alexandrian way of celebrating New Year's Eve. Hala Halim brings out the best china photo: Sherif Sonbol

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Copycat Cairenes might drop the occasional bottle on a New Year's Eve, but it is Alexandria that is noted for its time-honoured tradition of marking 12.00am on 1 January with an exuberant show of shattered glass, china and earthenware. The idea is to get rid of last year's luck and make room for the New Year's good fortune, says Mme Christina Constantinou. To Alexandrian Italians like Giovanni Giudice, the tradition "is similar to the way Neapolitans celebrate New Year's Eve," while Alexandrian Greeks like Georges Kypreos and Alki Constantinou suggest it is a Greek custom -- possible provenance, Piraeus.

And there's an etiquette to be observed here -- the magnanimous early-morning tipping of street sweeps, which Alki, for one, used to watch his grandmother dispense -- and a price to be paid, in the form of smashed car windshields, or at best flat tyres, changed by tipsy men in the small hours. Hence the decision of many Alexandrians, like Yves Bielinko, mathematics teacher at St Marc College, to stay home on New Year's Eve, "in order to be at peace and not have to change a tyre".

"Unfortunately, this is a bad habit we inherited from the foreigners," comments Hagg Ali El-Guiheini, owner of the Guiheini Café, right off Al-Mursi Abul-Abbas Mosque in the Square of the Mosques. Although he avers that his area is free of such antics, he nevertheless notes that there has been a marked decline in the quality of the debris -- there's no comparison between the fragments of fine china he used to see thrown on the pavement by New Year's Eve in the '40s and '50s and today's "cheap bottles".

Given the persistence of the custom, it comes as a surprise that a quick dip into the bound volumes of old newspapers in the Alexandria Municipal Library yields not a shard of evidence about this essential component of New Year's Eve, Alexandria-style. The reporters of La Réforme, the Alexandrian daily, or for that matter those of the Egyptian Gazette, seem to have looked upon this aspect of Alexandrian culture with something of the contempt in which Hagg Ali holds it. But a perusal of end-of-decade New Year's Eve coverage -- 2000 being the year of the round figure par excellence -- yields rich ephemera about theatrical get-ups, festive mores, and canny advertising.

Only a few scraps of the 1-4 January 1900 issues of La Réforme survive. While the front pages of these issues were invariably dedicated to the Boer War, the celebrations of the new century in Alexandria, no less, were serialised over an entire week -- together with an astonishing profusion of advertisements about life insurance companies, possibly seeking to capitalise on fin-de-siècle angst. More than one article was devoted to "The Reception at the German Consulate":

"As promised, we return to the reception held by Mme and M Von Hartmann on the occasion of the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. It remains for us to describe the costumes... [although] we cannot be exhaustive... First of all the hostess, ravishingly costumed as a butterfly... Then the amphytrion [host], in the rich costume of a gentleman from the Siamese court. Two very pretty, much admired outfits were those worn by Mme de Wodianer, in the national costume of Romania, and Mme Pierre Girard, dressed as a woman from Bethlehem. Mme Ivanoff, Mme Zervudachi, Mme Michel Sinadino, Mme Michala -- all in Empire costume of the highest taste. Mme Constantin Sinadino in the sparkling outfit of a Turkish princess. Mme Von Tschudi, in 'Geneva Convention', was much admired... Mme Binder was in a hand-painted 'North Pole' get-up -- a huge success. Mme Hellmers was dressed as Carmen, while Mme Rufler was costumed as an Indian woman. Mme Giro was dressed as a woman gardener. Mme Gescher was attired Queen Louise-style and Mme Gotschlich wore the costume of a woman from Berne. Mme Kanzky was got up as a Chinese lady... Mme Behrend wore a Mauresque number... Mme Dolder in 1820s fashion... Among the young girls, Miss Von Tschudi was charmingly costumed as a snow-ball... Gerbel was dressed en bicyclette..."

In contrast, the early January 1910 issues of La Réforme are short on party-going diaries. True, there was the obligatory annual account of the 1 January reception at the Consulate of France, attended by members of both the French and the Swiss "colonies", and where dignitaries' speeches celebrated the success of the Lycée Français, then in its infancy, and other new Francophone cultural institutions, culminating in toasts of "Vive La France!" and "Vive la République!" The absence of coverage of private parties may have owed something to a devastating fire that took place in the Douane des Tabacs, or Tobacco Stores, on Saturday 1 January 1910. The south wing of the douane, which the fire destroyed, comprised 100 depots, and 60,000 sacks were devoured by the flames. The event would have put a damper on the memory of the previous night's festivities, since many of the notables of Alexandrian society at the time were tobacco magnates, as La Réforme's list of companies and businessmen who lost in the fire reminds us.

Coming close on the heels of World War I and the 1919 Revolution, New Year's Eve 1920 was greeted by La Réforme with an almost reckless optimism: the weather had never been more splendid, Alexandrians had shopped for gifts almost till they dropped, and gone were "the mournful and silent firsts of January of the war years"; this was, no doubt, an "auspicious" beginning, "a new leaf in the book of Destiny". At the French Consulate celebrations of 1 January, there was much mournful mention of the victims of the war, coupled with triumphal rhetoric. Nor did the new, post-War world order go unmentioned. In a remarkable speech delivered on this occasion, Zaki Ragab, the delegate of "the Maghrebi Colony of Alexandria", paid homage to France's commitment to "the divine cause of liberty", and hastened to assuage any apprehensions that "our Syrian brothers [might have] about the new order of things" by assuring them that they "need not fear for [their] liberty: France will treat [them] as her own children."

But none of the rhetoric could disguise the seething turmoil in Egypt. The double La Réforme issue of 1-2 January 1920 contained a translation of a duel of words between Lord Milner (then conducting the controversial Milner Mission) and the Grand Mufti of Egypt about the country's recently proclaimed status as protectorate. The interview concludes with Lord Milner peevishly branding the stance of the Ulama as "hostile" and the Mufti responding that "a message from a weak country cannot be hostile, while the proclamation, by Britain, of the establishment of the protectorate is indeed hostile". On 3 January 1920, La Réforme dedicated a lengthy report to the Friday prayers of the previous day at Mursi Abul-Abbas Mosque, during which "grand meeting" numerous "indigènes" had discussed the interview, but the event had ended "without incident".

The glitter of the "Long Weekend" of the inter-war period seems not to have been reflected in the Egyptian Gazette's first issues of 1930. As with La Réforme's focus on the French Consulate, the Gazette, at this point, had its eyes locked on England. Hence the enumeration in the issue of 3 January 1930 of the "New Year's Honours" in Britain: the six new peers, the 26 knights, the women honourees, and so on. But then again, many a Gazette column inch was dedicated to the big New Year's news in Egypt: the triumphant return to power, in face of monarchical displeasure, of the Wafd. On 1 January 1930, Mustafa El-Nahhas Pasha "was received by His Majesty King Fouad... and was then requested to undertake the formation of the new government," according to the Gazette of 3 January. An advertisement in those early issues of 1930 announces Alexandria's then newest hotel, the Cecil: telephones in rooms, fireplaces in lounges, "American Bar and English Billiards" -- the works.

Amid the front-page news items in the Gazette's 3 January 1940 issue, most of which were dedicated to war-related subjects like Hitler's New Year greetings to Mussolini, Bulgaria's stance of neutrality, and British army conscription, a small item concerns the "Continuation of the Blackout" in Alexandria. Dictated by the British Naval Command, the blackout had apparently caused "a considerable amount of uninformed criticism" from Alexandrians. But judging by the Gazette's reports, neither blackouts, war nor rain managed to mar New Year's Eve celebrations. The streets were thronged by revellers, "wearing caps, playing guitars, singing and dancing," and the hotels and restaurants were likewise packed to the hilt. At the Cecil, trumpeters sounded the Reveille, after which "the New Year was heralded in to the harmonious strains of Auld Lang Syne" followed by "English and Scottish dances". The nearby Windsor Palace was decorated as a rose garden and at midnight "the softly shaded lights and the great lights from the chandeliers suddenly disappeared... then a stream of light burst through a casement which opened for a rising sun to appear, with illuminated globes, below, wishing everyone a Happy New Year in English and in French." The then fashionable tunes like The Lambeth Walk competed with the waltz at the Windsor party, while the Monseigneur offered an Argentinean orchestra, and the Carlton Hall, not to be left out, boasted a jazz band called the Swing Men from Harlem.

Two years shy of the 1952 Revolution, La Réforme had already cottoned on to the trend of Arabisation, with the name of the newspaper now written in Arabic as well as French. And there is a hint of post-war malaise in the very bland report about New Year's Eve celebrations at various Alexandrian nightclubs -- a tiredness in the absence of detail, in the mere reiteration of "dazzling jewels" and "gorgeous furs" everywhere on display, in the determined gaiety into the small hours, whether at the Syrian Club, the San Stefano, the Auberge Bleue, the Carlton or the Pergola of the Swiss Cottage. Indeed, a sense of end-of-an-era is palpable in the speeches made at the 1 January 1950 French Consulate reception, quoted in the 2 January issue. Certainly, the many panicky demands put forward to the consul by the Federation of the French Associations of Alexandria on this supposedly festive occasion lead to such an impression. These demands included the facilitation of the repatriation of French citizens who are no longer able to obtain employment in Egypt, that free instruction at French schools be guaranteed to French children residing in Egypt, and that free passage be provided to French youths desiring to perform their military service in the "métropole".

For the "personnel" of "cosmopolitan" Alexandria to whom such newspapers as La Réforme were addressed, there would be the finality of events of the following years -- the deposition of King Farouk and the 1952 Revolution, 1956 and the extradition of French and British nationals, as well as stateless Jews, the Agrarian Reforms and the consequent loss of foreigners' and wealthy Egyptians' estates, and finally the sequestrations of the early 1960s. There is reason to suggest that Alexandria had always been out on a limb of its own, and that within the city there had always been something of two nations, the "cosmopolitan" and the "indigenous", the former eventually settling abroad but no less attached to Alexandria for it.

But there is also a sense of these two nations now tentatively meeting in deterritorialised "sites". The Amicale Alexandrie Hier et Aujourd'hui (AAHA), established by Sandro Manzoni, an Alexandrian Italian engineer now living in Switzerland, comprises, in addition to a quarterly newsletter, branches of this social association in different countries. Each of these branches has been given a different sobriquet by Manzoni, like "Les Haschachins" of Geneva and Lausanne, "Les Bakkaschins" of Paris, "the Skandarani from Down Under" of Sidney, Australia, "Les Bahharines of the region of Montreal", and "the métèques of Sao Paolo, Brazil". Another such site, this time in cyberspace, is "Alexandrians on the Internet", a network that allows Alexandrians at home and abroad to correspond. A casual electronic poll of a handful of Alexandrians living abroad reveals a certain nostalgia for New Year's Eves in Alexandria, and a subdued, certainly non-bottle-smashing, style of greeting the new millennium.

For Alexandrian Greek Vassili Corbas, a mathematics lecturer at the University of Reading, the last two New Year's Eves in Alexandria, 1955 and 1956, were spent quite quietly in Ramleh Station restaurants. He remembers, almost as a rite of passage, the Eve of 1955, which he spent, for the first time away from his parents, with two close friends "in a very subdued way... in 'Ala Kefak, talking, smoking a lot and [being] incredibly bored". Walking home later, the three friends, soon to be "exiled" from Alexandria, "without confessing it to each other at the time... had the impression we had lost something for good". There followed years in which "not one day passed without [his] secretly cherishing Iskenderiah," years punctuated by his "periodical meeting with Alexandrian friends... in a small Arab restaurant in London and dreaming collectively of the day we would go back".

And Corbas's plan for the Eve of the new millennium? "To spend the evening with an old Alexandrian friend and our families... [W]e shall certainly look with nostalgia at the many photos of Alexandria that we have."

Giovanni Giudice, of the Rome branch of AAHA, established a year ago, says that, while over the past 40 years he has often spent his New Year's Eves at parties organised by one or another Italian-Egyptian association, AAHA's last reunion was held in December 1999, at an Egyptian restaurant in Rome, and hence he spent his New Year's Eve at a private party.

For Albert de Vidas, who now lives in the US and is one of the editors of the AAHA bulletin, the last Alexandrian New Year's Eve was that of 1955, spent at the party his grandmother gave at her Sidi Gaber villa, where the "jasmine scent perfumed the air and a small orchestra played... tango, fox-trot, [and] waltz," and the melange of languages spoken by the "polyglot" guests bespoke "the cosmopolitan epoch of Alexandria". His New Year's Eve? A homey, en famille one -- "nothing special... except that our friends are now dispersed in the four corners of the globe."

Larry Barouch, an Alexandrian Paris-based astrophysicist, in his keenness to avoid "drunken, rowdy millennium celebrators", tried to book himself on a trip to Tanzania, but the "millennium surcharge" got in the way, so it was to be a quiet evening at home. Similarly, Amina El-Sadr, an Alexandrian now living in Irvine, California, went for a quiet evening. Describing the US-based Egyptian American Organisation to which she belongs as "an extended family", with "an especially large number of Alexandrians... [who] share a special bond", she adds that the Organisation's celebrations will be saved for 15 January 2000, to mark both the Coptic Christmas and the Muslim Eid.

On 1 January 2000, Alexandrian taxi drivers were grumbling, as usual, about glass splinters and flat tyres. Plus ça change...

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