Cyrenaica In a wider sense, still in use, Cyrenaica includes all of the eastern part of Libya, including the Kufra District. Cyrenaica borders on Tripolitania in the northwest and on Fezzan in the southwest. The region that used to be Cyrenaica officially until 1963 has formed several shabiyat, the administrative divisions of Libya, since 1995. The 2011 Libyan Civil War started in Cyrenaica, which came largely under the control of the National Transitional Council (headquartered in Benghazi) for most of the war. In 2012, the National Transitional Council declared Cyrenaica to be an autonomous region of Libya. Geologically, Cyrenaica rests on
Names of the Greeks region named Graea, and Pausanias mentions that the ancient city of Tanagra was for a time called Graea, adding that "no one knows where this Graia really was; Aristotle thought it was near Oropus, further east on the same coast as Delion." Busolt claimed that the name was given by the Romans originally to the Greek colonists from Graea who helped to found Cumae the important city in southern Italy where the Latins first encountered the Greeks and then to all Greeks. According to Rene Olivier, in the French language the word "grec" ("Greek") is sometimes also used as an