Cyrene

Colonists from Thera, which is Santorini, sailed here in 631 BC under a leader called Battus and built what became the most important Greek city in Africa, on a green escarpment above the coast in what is now northeastern Libya. The temple of Apollo goes back to the seventh century BC, and the necropolis is the thing that stops people: about 20 square kilometres of tombs cut into the rock all around the city, one of the largest Greek burial grounds known anywhere, in use from the sixth century BC to the fifth century AD. You are walking through a city of the dead considerably bigger than the city. UNESCO listed it in 1982 and moved it onto the List of World Heritage in Danger in 2017. Near modern Shahhat. Libya carries severe travel advisories and this entry is here as a record of what is there.