Libya - Cyrene

Cyrene was an ancient Greek and later Roman city near present-day Shahhat, Libya.  It was the oldest and most important of the five Greek cities in the region.

Cyril Sladden alluded to Cyrene in a letter to his father of 5th July 1915 when sailing from England to the Dardanelles.  Censorship meant that he was unable to give actual names of the places he passed, so he referred to it as “the place where Arthur went and did his digging”.

Arthur Sladden, after qualifying as a doctor, became Medical Officer for an American team working on an archaeological dig at Cyrene, Libya.  He was there from October 1910 to April 1911 and wrote a report about his work for the Archaeological Institute of America.  The project was abandoned in 1911 following the murder of a staff member, Herbert Fletcher de Cou, by local assailants on 11th March.  The leader of the excavation was Richard Norton, who Arthur met up with again during the war.

Since 1982, Cyrene has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site.