Benghazi began as Greek Euesperides around 525 BC
Libya's second-largest city and Cyrenaica's chief urban center carries a name meaning "Son of Ghazi." A Greek colony called Euesperides stood here from about 525 BC; in the third century BC it was moved and refounded before later centuries remade the port again.
Benghazi anchors eastern Libya's commerce, industry, transport, and culture alongside Tripoli and Misrata among the country's largest cities. Classical roots run to Euesperides, planted near the site around 525 BC, then relocated and renamed in the third century BC as Hellenistic dynasts reshaped Cyrenaica's coast.
Archaeology puts Greek settlers on the site by the late seventh century BC, probably from Cyrene or Barca, beside a lagoon then deep enough for small boats; the fertile surroundings evoked the mythical garden of the Hesperides. Herodotus mentions the city in a Persian expedition of about 515 BC, its oldest coins date to 480 BC, and in 414 BC the Spartan general Gylippus, blown off course to Sicily, rescued it from a Libyan siege. After Berenice married Ptolemy III in 246 BC, the town moved to a site beneath today's centre and took her name, perhaps because the lagoons silted up.
Roman Berenice thrived for some 600 years and became Cyrenaica's chief city, yet by the Arab conquest of 642 to 643 it had shrunk to a village among ruins. Genoese merchants traded there in the thirteenth century, and sixteenth-century maps show the name Marsa ibn Ghazi. The Ottomans took it in 1578; plague struck in 1858 and 1874. Italy seized it in 1911, and by 1939 Italians made up more than 35 percent of the population amid a building boom that added an airport, a railway station and an enlarged port. In the Second World War it changed hands several times, falling to the British on 6 February 1941 and to Rommel on 4 April. Its 2023 population was estimated at 859,000.
Source: Benghazi
