This lovely mountain resort town is perched above the eastern end of
the beautiful Kadisha Gorge and at the foothills of the Cedars of Lebanon.
It is the brith place of Lebanon's most famous author
Khalil Gibran. It has a small museum which pays tribute to him.
Beiteddine palace was built over a period of thirty years by Emir Bechir Chehab II.
It's architecture reflects the typical oriental architecture of the 19th century Ottoman Era.
It is remarkable for its glamorous
arcades, multicolored mosaic floors, reception rooms, harems, hammams
and even by its guest house "Diyafa" where passing guests were lodged
(French poet Lamartine stayed once there).
Detail of the Sarcophagus of Ahiram, king of Byblos, seated
on a cherub throne, before an offering table, 13th century B.C (National Museum of Beirut).
Around 1200 B.C. the scribes of Byblos developed an alphabetic phonetic script, the precursor of our modern
alphabet. By 800 B.C., it had traveled to Greece, changing forever the way man communicated.
Located in the Beqaa Valley of Lebanon, Baalbek is an ancient city
that has been designated as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Originally
Canaanite (3rd century BC), the Assyrians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines,
and Arabs successively occupied Ba'albek and left their imprints on the
place, often modifying what existed previously.
www.kaftoun.com
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A version of this article appeared in print on August 25, 2010, on page A16 of the New York edition.
CConjure, for a moment, a place just steps from City Hall but a world apart. Salaam.
Yes, that is the fragrance of strong coffee in the air, of sweet figs and tart lemons, of pastries that remind buyers of childhoods in Damascus and Beirut. Bazaars abound with handmade rugs and brass lamps and water pipes. Men wear fezzes. A few women retire behind veils. Al-Hoda is the leading newspaper. Business signs — at least those legible to a non-Arabic speaker — proclaim “Rahaim & Malhami,” “Noor & Maloof” and “Sahadi Bros.”
This is not what the lower west side of Manhattan would look like if the much-debated Islamic community center were built two blocks from the World Trade Center site. This is what it looked like decades before the World Trade Center was even envisioned. This is its heritage.
AAll but lost to living memory and forgotten in the current controversy, Washington Street was the “heart of New York’s Arab world,” as The New York Times described it in 1946, shortly before that Arab-American community was almost entirely displaced by construction of entrance ramps to the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel.
To be clear: this neighborhood, called Little Syria, was south of what would become the trade center site, while the Islamic center would be to the north. And Muslims, chiefly from Palestine, made up perhaps 5 percent of its population. The Syrians and Lebanese in the neighborhood were mostly Christian.
Washington Street was “an enclave in the New World where Arabs first peddled goods, worked in sweatshops, lived in tenements and hung their own signs on stores,” Gregory Orfalea wrote in “The Arab Americans” (Olive Branch Press, 2006). Among them was Mr. Orfalea’s grandmother Nazera Jabaly Orfalea, who arrived in New York from Syria in 1890.
“She would have walked Washington Street,” he said in an interview. “She was a peddler. I have no doubt she was grubstaked by suppliers on Washington Street.”
Mr. Orfalea attributed the migration of Syrians, Lebanese and Palestinians to starvation, lawlessness, conscription, taxation and religious intolerance at home; to proselytizing by American missionaries; and to economic troubles that led them to a new world where cultures existed, sometimes bruisingly, cheek by jowl.
“The calls in Arabic of the mothers to their children romping on the street mingle with the jazz screechings from another home and the Homeric curses of the truck-drivers on their way to the wharves,” Konrad Bercovici wrote in the 1924 book, “Around the World in New York,” with a nod toward the nearby Greek settlement of Little Athens.
But the presence of the intelligentsia in the quarter was no bulwark against stereotype. A neighborhood brawl in 1905 was fought by “wild-eyed Syrians,” The Times reported. “The dim light from barroom and cafe showed the glint of steel in 200 swarthy hands.”
Mr. Orfalea discerned parallels with the present controversy. “We fail to deal with the Arab world in rational terms,” he said, “because we immediately reduce them to the irrational.”
Historical accounts describe no mosques on Washington Street, but there were three churches that served the Lebanese and Syrian Christians.
St. George Chapel of the Melkite Rite still stands, at 103 Washington Street. It may be the last recognizable remnant of Little Syria. It is now Moran’s Ale House and Grill.
