A short distance north of Beirut, along the coast, is the little town of Byblos, or Jbail in Arabic. There has been a town here for at least 7,000 years, and it is often claimed that Byblos is the oldest continuously-inhabited town in the world. One after another, the great civilisations of the eastern Mediterranean have left their mark here, Phoenician, Egyptian, Persian, Hellenic, Roman, Islamic, Christian. The archaeological site next to the medieval town centre includes remnants of societies and cultures from different periods going back millennia. Some have been moved from one spot to another by archaeologists, to enable the excavation of earlier remains.
There are royal tombs cut in vertical shafts. One of them, the 3,000 year old tomb of King Ahiram, contained a sarcophagus, now in the National Museum in Beirut, with an inscription in the ancient Phoenician alphabet. The earlier “Obelisk temple”, which was moved to enable the excavation of an even older temple underneath, contained numerous small gold-plated bronze figurines, now also in the National Museum, that are a symbol of Byblos. Nearby are the sturdy walls of a later Persian fortress. There is a Roman theatre, and the remains of a Roman fountain.
Hard as it might be to imagine, this little town was also once a favoured destination for the international jet set and their yachts. I stayed in a guesthouse attached to the Fishing Club restaurant, which gives on to the pretty little harbour. In the 1960s, the rich, the famous, the powerful and the glamorous of the world came to enjoy the hospitality of its proprietor, Pepe Abed, a tourism pioneer in Lebanon, who also owned nightclubs in Beirut and Tyre. The walls of the restaurant terrace are covered with photos of the famous guests, Brigitte Bardot, Marlon Brando and David Niven among them, as well as Vaclav Havel, Jacques Chirac and Helmut Kohl. Alas, since the end of the civil war, the glitterati have not returned to Byblos. In March, when I was there, the restaurant terrace and the harbour were quiet. No yachts in sight.
Byblos’s population is a predominantly Maronite Christian. The 12th century Church of St John the Baptist was built during the town’s period of Crusader rule. The Crusaders also built the impressive fortress which dominates the archaeological site, much of whose masonry came from the Roman buildings that once stood there. The ends of Roman columns can be seen sticking out from the walls.
In addition to a Shia Muslim population, there is also a small Armenian community. I visited the ‘Aram Bezikian’ museum of the orphans of the Armenian genocide, which was opened in 2015, the year of the centenary of the genocide. Among the survivors who in 1915 were marched across Anatolia and Syria, were large numbers of children separated from their families. The building in Byblos that houses the museum was one of the orphanages established to care for them. I had visited the genocide museum in Yerevan a few months earlier. Though on a smaller scale, a visit to the museum in Byblos is also a moving experience. Leading up to the entrance is a row of statues of skinny children seated on the ground, their food bowls in front of them. Inside, exhibits about the life of the Armenian community in Turkey before the genocide, and about the horror of the genocide itself, recall the museum in Yerevan. Upstairs there are exhibits about the humanitarian efforts to care for the orphans. It is estimated that there are around 150,000 Armenians in Lebanon today. There had been more, but many left during the civil war. A young man I spoke to at the museum in Byblos told me they have their own schools and churches. He could, he said, speak both Arabic and Armenian fluently, as well as English.
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