The University of Warsaw excavates in Alexandria since the late 1950s, when professor Kazimierz Michałowski as a visiting professor in Alexandria (1958) made his first trial pits in a place which was said to contain the remnants of the tomb of Alexander the Great. The regular excavations at Komel-Dikka (“The Bank Hill” the word dikka is a synonym of mastaba or “mud bench”) in the very centre of Alexandria, ancient and modern, by Professor Kazimierz Michałowski and his disciples of the Polish Centre of Archaeology (being a part of Warsaw University) have uncovered since 1960 a fragment of the ancient street grid, colonnades, a complex of Roman baths of the fourth century AD with adjacent cisterns, porticoes and rooms, a small Late Roman theatre (or auditorium), houses of the second and third century AD, a Byzantine residential area and many other elements of Late Roman urban architecture.

In the earlier Roman period the excavated area in the heart of Alexandria was a residential quarter. Those houses of wealthy Alexandrians were partly destroyed and abandoned by the end of the third century AD (probably in the times of Diocletian whose soldiers devastated the city centre). Only as late as the second half of the fourth century the area was re-arranged and received a set of new public buildings — a small theatre and a large Roman bath.