ANGELOS DALACHANIS The Greek Exodus from Egypt: Diaspora Politics and Emigration, 1937-1962 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2017)

On 12 January 2019, Al-Ahram reported that the Egyptian foreign minister and the Greek deputy foreign minister were meeting to prepare for the third round of the Roots Revival initiative. Bringing together Egypt, Greece, and Cyprus,1 the goal was to honor foreign communities that had lived on Egyptian soil. The initiative had been first announced by Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi during a visit to Cyprus in November 2017, and was then launched in April 2018 by inviting delegations of Greeks and Cypriots who had once lived in Egypt to a “homecoming.” Cairo made explicit the underlying “soft power” goals of this initiative: to build or reinforce political, social, cultural, and economic bridges to communities around the Mediterranean; to profile “Egypt as a country of refuge that has opened its arms to foreign communities throughout its history;” and to highlight that these “communities in turn have enriched Egypt’s cultural diversity.”2