34 Eftychia Mylona INTRODUCTION Chryssoula Sava was a first-generation Egyptian Greek, born in 1947 in Port Tawfik, Egypt, where she resided with her family. Her father, a migrant from the island of Kastellorizo, Greece, arrived in Egypt at the beginning of the twentieth century and worked as a mechanic in an unidentified company at the Suez Canal. Chryssoula was born with no citizenship status. On her birth certificate, Chryssoula’s raʿīya maḥallīya (which translates to “local subject (flock)” or “local residency”) was recorded. This categorization, which marks the only piece of information on her raʿīya maḥallīya, indicates that she was a local resident of Port Tawfik. However, some years later, her status changed, as the raʿīya maḥallīya stated on her student card, generated when she attended fifth grade at the Suez and Port Tawfik Greek Community School in 1963–1964, noted Egyptian citizenship. These two documents affirm that her father had gained Egyptian citizenship at some point in the 1950s or early 1960s. Just as she had inherited a lack of citizenship from her Greek immigrant father, once her father took Egyptian citizenship, Chryssoula became an Egyptian citizen as well, consequently providing her with opportunities in the job market as a future employee and access to state resources afforded to other Egyptian nationals.2 In this article, I examine the Greek community in the Suez Canal region to analyze how Greeks moved through categories of legal belonging—namely, citizenship and statelessness—and how these categories were imposed, first by the Ottoman Empire and then by the Egyptian nation-state. Specifically, I discuss the categories of Ottoman and post-Ottoman subjects, as well as Greeks living with Italian papers due to Italian occupation, and how they moved, or not, into categories of legal belonging. I employ the term “legal belonging,” coined by Jessica M. Marglin, as it captures the complexity and diversity of ligatures between states and individuals in the late nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries.3 Why was Chryssoula’s father without citizenship in 1947? And what factors may have encouraged him to take Egyptian citizenship in subsequent years? With the creation of the modern Egyptian state and new forms of documentation and surveillance, a noticeable number of Greeks, among other foreigners in Egypt, did not fit easily into Egyptian or Greek citizenship. By examining these cases, this article reveals how categories of legal belonging changed over time and how certain individuals fell through the cracks of such categorizations. In addition, I question what implications, obstacles, or opportunities for a child’s social and economic participation these changes entailed.