"The
righteous flourish like the palm tree and grow like the cedar in Lebanon
". The Bible is replete with numerous references to the cedars of Lebanon
and even my occasional reading of the Bible couldn’t miss such verses.
But my more journalistic interest in Lebanon stemmed from the stories and
pictures Frontline carried on the civil war in the country at the end of the
20th century. Lebanon in our minds has a "Visit at your own risk"
tag, so it was natural for V to ask me whether it was safe to do so when I got
this offer to visit Beirut as part of a week's assignment in July.
Signs of the strife was visible on the older buildings in Beirut, ridden with bullets, as we were transported from the Rafik Hariri airport to Antelias where we stayed at the Armenian Orthodox Catholicosate (the headquarters as well as where the patriarch of the Church resides). But looking at the swank new buildings dotting the city, one gets the impression that Beirut is a city that is trying hard to wipe out memories of the war.
Lebanon has an interesting landscape - the sea on one side and mountains on the other. And the mountains are dotted with buildings, their numbers having gone up with the refugee influx. No wonder the staff at the visa processing center at the Lebanese consulate in Dubai and the immigration counters at the Beirut airport are equally suspicious of your intentions on arriving with a business visa. The situation is not much different for those in our group who took the tourist visa - Lebanon just can’t afford to have people overstaying. My entry is sanctioned for 15 days only though the visa can be procured for 3 months according to rules. And until you cross the immigration counter, you are fervently hoping and praying that they won’t forbid your entry. My visa application had in the first place been facilitated by Vinod’s stable income in the UAE, and secondly by my written assurance that I will return to where I came from.
Beirut airport sits on the coast and our aircraft taxied on a runway not far from the sea waters. In the distance, the mountains with the famed cedars beckoned to us.
Our accommodation was 5 km away, at the Armenian Catholicosate in Antelias. Originally the site of an orphanage for children who had escaped the Armenian Genocide of 1915, the Catholicosate has a spacious campus that is neat and serene, as opposed to the narrow roads and traffic congestion outside. Apart from the residence of the Catholicos, HH Aram I, there is a monastery for celibate monks, a guest house, a museum cum conference hall and the genocide memorial. The genocide memorial is relatively new, erected in 2015 to commemorate 100 years of the genocide - the extermination of 1.5 million Armenian Christians by the Ottoman empire quite like the Nazi -authored genocide of Jews during World War II. I learn that much of today's Turkey belong to Armenia and if ever Turkey were to acknowledge its atrocities it would have to return Armenian land and be left with just 10% of its present day territory.
History is replete with incidents of man's atrocities against each other for money, power and land. Religion often plays a role in the targeting of communities.
Signs of the strife was visible on the older buildings in Beirut, ridden with bullets, as we were transported from the Rafik Hariri airport to Antelias where we stayed at the Armenian Orthodox Catholicosate (the headquarters as well as where the patriarch of the Church resides). But looking at the swank new buildings dotting the city, one gets the impression that Beirut is a city that is trying hard to wipe out memories of the war.
Lebanon has an interesting landscape - the sea on one side and mountains on the other. And the mountains are dotted with buildings, their numbers having gone up with the refugee influx. No wonder the staff at the visa processing center at the Lebanese consulate in Dubai and the immigration counters at the Beirut airport are equally suspicious of your intentions on arriving with a business visa. The situation is not much different for those in our group who took the tourist visa - Lebanon just can’t afford to have people overstaying. My entry is sanctioned for 15 days only though the visa can be procured for 3 months according to rules. And until you cross the immigration counter, you are fervently hoping and praying that they won’t forbid your entry. My visa application had in the first place been facilitated by Vinod’s stable income in the UAE, and secondly by my written assurance that I will return to where I came from.
Beirut airport sits on the coast and our aircraft taxied on a runway not far from the sea waters. In the distance, the mountains with the famed cedars beckoned to us.
Our accommodation was 5 km away, at the Armenian Catholicosate in Antelias. Originally the site of an orphanage for children who had escaped the Armenian Genocide of 1915, the Catholicosate has a spacious campus that is neat and serene, as opposed to the narrow roads and traffic congestion outside. Apart from the residence of the Catholicos, HH Aram I, there is a monastery for celibate monks, a guest house, a museum cum conference hall and the genocide memorial. The genocide memorial is relatively new, erected in 2015 to commemorate 100 years of the genocide - the extermination of 1.5 million Armenian Christians by the Ottoman empire quite like the Nazi -authored genocide of Jews during World War II. I learn that much of today's Turkey belong to Armenia and if ever Turkey were to acknowledge its atrocities it would have to return Armenian land and be left with just 10% of its present day territory.
History is replete with incidents of man's atrocities against each other for money, power and land. Religion often plays a role in the targeting of communities.
The
genocide memorial at Antelias has a powerful symbol - of skulls encased in a
glass case which were recovered from the Syrian desert. These belong to
Armenians who were led like lambs to the slaughter; many died of starvation
while many others were shot dead by the Turkish soldiers. A recorded audio
message plays while we bow our heads in sorrow inside the memorial.
Beirut
to Byblos
The horrors of the Armenian Holocaust became very evident to us in the ensuing days - unlike the Jewish Holocaust this had attracted less international coverage and attention. And when I looked at the Armenians around me, it gave me a deep sense of pain at what their forefathers went through - a collective sense of their suffering seems to be infused in their bodies.
It was carefully portrayed at the Birds Nest orphanage in the coastal old town of Byblos, 40 km away, and which preserves all the photographs of the genocide events - of Armenians living in prosperity before the holocaust, the shaping of the persecution and the massacre over a four-year period. Birds' Nest was run by a Dutch lady who called it so because the children gathered around her like birds at feed time.
Byblos, like the Bible, means book in Greek, and refers to the main item of trade - papyrus - from its port during the Phoenician/Canaanite civilisation. It apparently is one of the oldest inhabited cities of the world and has seen continuous human settlements for 7000 years. The original alphabet also came from there. Byblos is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and has ruins from the Pheonician, Egyptian, Greek and Roman periods. Unfortunately I had no time to visit them.
In the evening before my departure, I roped in a couple of my team members for a short sight-seeing tour of Beirut city, once the Paris of the Middle East. Roman ruins like the Bath are preserved in the middle of downtown Beirut - they blend seamlessly with the sleek office spaces, restaurants and outdoor lounges. Huge TV screens were kept everywhere for the football fans; it was the World Cup season and Lebanon seemed to be in a football frenzy going by the flags on cars and buildings and those for sale on the wayside. Downtown Beirut has the Parliament, a modest slim structure in yellow that has very little of the grandeur and inaccessibility of the Indian Parliament. One reminder of the 15-year civil war is the presence of gun-toting soldiers in central Beirut, standing unobtrusively under any available shade in the summer heat.
Just as the sharing of power in Parliament between Lebanon's Christian and Muslim population (the Prime Minister is elected from the Muslim community and the President from the Christian), there is a sharing of space between churches and mosques in downtown Beirut. After visiting the Greek cathedral, we hesitated in front of the Blue Mosque next door. A mosque official ushered us in, once we had enrobed ourselves in the abaya rented out to female visitors. For the first time I bowed my head in prayer in a mosque - my previous trips to mosques like the Big Mosque in Abu Dhabi or the Jama Masjid in Delhi had been touristy and photo-op.
The horrors of the Armenian Holocaust became very evident to us in the ensuing days - unlike the Jewish Holocaust this had attracted less international coverage and attention. And when I looked at the Armenians around me, it gave me a deep sense of pain at what their forefathers went through - a collective sense of their suffering seems to be infused in their bodies.
It was carefully portrayed at the Birds Nest orphanage in the coastal old town of Byblos, 40 km away, and which preserves all the photographs of the genocide events - of Armenians living in prosperity before the holocaust, the shaping of the persecution and the massacre over a four-year period. Birds' Nest was run by a Dutch lady who called it so because the children gathered around her like birds at feed time.
Byblos, like the Bible, means book in Greek, and refers to the main item of trade - papyrus - from its port during the Phoenician/Canaanite civilisation. It apparently is one of the oldest inhabited cities of the world and has seen continuous human settlements for 7000 years. The original alphabet also came from there. Byblos is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and has ruins from the Pheonician, Egyptian, Greek and Roman periods. Unfortunately I had no time to visit them.
In the evening before my departure, I roped in a couple of my team members for a short sight-seeing tour of Beirut city, once the Paris of the Middle East. Roman ruins like the Bath are preserved in the middle of downtown Beirut - they blend seamlessly with the sleek office spaces, restaurants and outdoor lounges. Huge TV screens were kept everywhere for the football fans; it was the World Cup season and Lebanon seemed to be in a football frenzy going by the flags on cars and buildings and those for sale on the wayside. Downtown Beirut has the Parliament, a modest slim structure in yellow that has very little of the grandeur and inaccessibility of the Indian Parliament. One reminder of the 15-year civil war is the presence of gun-toting soldiers in central Beirut, standing unobtrusively under any available shade in the summer heat.
Just as the sharing of power in Parliament between Lebanon's Christian and Muslim population (the Prime Minister is elected from the Muslim community and the President from the Christian), there is a sharing of space between churches and mosques in downtown Beirut. After visiting the Greek cathedral, we hesitated in front of the Blue Mosque next door. A mosque official ushered us in, once we had enrobed ourselves in the abaya rented out to female visitors. For the first time I bowed my head in prayer in a mosque - my previous trips to mosques like the Big Mosque in Abu Dhabi or the Jama Masjid in Delhi had been touristy and photo-op.
Our last stop was the corniche
along the sea, from where we could see the Pigeon’s Rock – a natural rock
formation in the sea that resembled the Gateway of India. We made the arduous
walk down to the sea through an unkempt path, rocky and bushy in parts, along
with our portly Armenian driver Aram. Aram seemed a very common name among
Armenians; the first Aram I knew of was a character in my Grade 9 textbook – a young
humorous boy in William Saroyan’s My name is Aram. Aram our chauffeur
enlightens us that every Armenian surname ends with a -ian or –yan.
After buying some customary
Lebanese sweets (I conveniently forget that Lebanese bakeries dot every corner
of the UAE landscape), we head home. By night, we bid goodbye to the
Catholicosate and its beautiful church. It had been soothing for me to wake to
the sound of church bells ringing every morning for a week. And the bed in the
modest guesthouse rooms had been the most comfortable and heavenly I had slept
on – maybe I am overreacting, and it is just the nostalgia of a relaxing week
cocooned in the Catholicosate. J
