Cyrene

Cyrene, sometimes anglicized as Kyrene, was an ancient Greek colony and Roman city near present-day Shahhat in northeastern Libya in North Africa. It was part of the Pentapolis, a group of five cities in the region and gave the area its name Cyrenaica.

Founded in the 7th century B.C., Cyrene was one of the principal cities in the Hellenic world.

UNESCO added the site to its World Heritage List in 1992. “A thousand years of history is written into its ruins,” it said. Cyrene lies between the Egyptian border and Benghazi.

The city was attributed to Apollo and the legendary etymon Cyrene by the Greeks but it was probably colonized by settlers from Thera (modern Santorini) in the late seventh century BC. It was initially ruled by a dynasty of monarchs called the Battiads, who grew rich from the export of horses and silphium, a medicinal plant.

The ruins of Cyrene survived Libya’s 2011 revolution and a decade of lawlessness but now face looters.