40 Eftychia Mylona that they would obtain Greek nationality instead, many Ottoman subjects did not claim Egyptian citizenship, remaining stateless for years. For instance, one of my interlocutors, Alekos, recalled that his grandfather arrived in Egypt from Cyprus as a child with his family in 1905, and only obtained Egyptian citizenship in 1950. Until then, he could not leave Egypt, as he did not have any papers.20 As the case of Chryssoula Sava indicates, the apatrides, or those with a raʿīya maḥallīya rather than citizenship status, were still present not only in post-1922 Egypt but even in 1950s and 1960s Egypt; however, by then their number had shrunk. In 1953, six years after Chryssoula’s birth, the Greek consulate authorities estimated that there were eighty apatrides of Greek origin in Suez. Alongside these eighty apatrides, the authorities estimated that there were 2,325 Greek nationals, and 270 British and 100 Egyptian nationals with Greek origin, thereby totalling 2,775 persons of Greek origin.21 The presence of the apatrides can be traced on the birth certificates of Greek children born and registered in Suez and Ismailia in the 1950s and the 1960s and without citizenship status. On some birth certificates, no citizenship status was written; rather it was only the raʿīya maḥallīya that was recorded. Indeed, there is no straightforward link in the archival records I examined between the raʿīya maḥallīya and those former Ottoman subjects who had the stateless status of the apatrides. Nevertheless, the fact that the Ottoman state identified its subjects as reaya (Ottoman Turkish) or raʿīya (Arabic), meaning “the Ottoman flock,” which was the equivalent of the raʿīya maḥallīya of the Egyptian state for the apatrides, suggests the similarity of these two. The documented change in legal belonging from having no citizenship on birth certificates to having Egyptian citizenship on their student cards indicates that the Egyptian state granted access to citizenship in the 1950s and 1960s to those Greeks and others who were stateless, as in the case of Chryssoula and her father. As I discuss below, changing Egyptian laws would have made Egyptian citizenship attractive to those who were stateless, as employment, geographic mobility, and access to resources hinged on documented status. Aside from those Greeks who arrived in Egypt as Ottoman subjects and at times became apatrides, those specifically located in the Suez Canal region also identified as having Cittadinanza Egea Italiana, which translates to “Italian Aegean citizenship.” As mentioned above, many Greeks who lived in the Suez Canal zone, as in other places in Egypt, originated from places that did not become part of the Greek state until long after its foundation in 1830. For example, the