Benghazi - City of Libya

Benghazi or Bengasi is the second largest city in Libya and the main city of the Cyrenaica region (or ex-Province). It is also a municipal territory of Libya of the wider city area. During the Kingdom era of Libya's history, Benghazi enjoyed a sort of joint-capital status, possibly because the King used to reside in the nearby city of Al Bayda' and the Senussis in general were associated with Cyrenaica rather than Tripolitania.

Benghazi continues to hold institutions and organizations associated normally with a national capital city. This creates a constant atmosphere of rivalry and sensitivities between it and Tripoli and by extension between the two regions.

The Anciecnt Greek city that existed within the modern day boundaries of Benghazi was founded around 525B.C. and called Euesperides. It was probably founded by people from Cyrene or Barce on the edge of a lagoon which opened from the sea and was at the time may have been deep enough to receive small sailing vessels. The name was attributed to the fertility of the neighbourhood, which gave rise to the mythological associations with the garden of the Hesperides .The ancient city existed on on a raised piece of land opposite what is now the Sidi-Abayd graveyard in the Northern Benghazi suburb of Sbikhat al-Salmani.

In the 1200s, the small settlement became an important player in the trade growing up between Genoese merchants and the tribes of the hinterland. In 16th century maps, the name of Marsa ibn Ghazi appears. Benghazi had a strategic port location, one that was too useful to be ignored by the Ottomans. It was in 1578 that the Turks invaded Benghazi and it was ruled from Tripoli by the Karamanlis from 1711-1835, then it passed under direct Ottoman rule until 1911. Under Ottoman rule, Benghazi was the most impoverished of the Ottoman provinces. It had neither a paved road nor telegraph service, and the harbor was too silted to permit the access of shipping. Greek and Italian sponge fishermen worked its coastal waters. In 1858, and again in 1874, Benghazi was devastated by bubonic plague.

Modern Benghazi, on the Gulf of Sidra, lies a little southwest of the site of the ancient Greek city of Berenice or Berenicis. That city was traditionally founded in 446 BCE , by a brother of the king of Cyrene, but got the name Berenice only when it was refounded in the 3rd century BCE under the patronage of Berenice , the daughter of Magas, king of Cyrene, and wife of Ptolemy III Euergetes, the ruler of Egypt. The new city was later given the name Hesperides, in reference to the Hesperides, the guardians of the mythic western paradise.