BEIRUT, 10 February — Around part of the Omari Mosque in central Beirut there is a very high wall.
It’s not to give privacy to the faithful — the wonderful 12th-century construction is under repair and empty — but, Beirutis suspect, to make sure that simple folk don’t find reason to object to the rather odd way in which the place is being restored.
I slipped in through a side gate last week, avoiding the Syrian building workers — the Lebanese won’t dirty their hands on this sort of job — and found a pile of Roman pedestals lying in the corner of what had once been a church apse. And, round the back, what appeared to be the bases of Roman columns were poking from a pile of rubble. Just who, I asked myself, is protecting the heritage of ancient Beirut.
During the 1975-1990 civil war the Omar Mosque stood on the city’s front line and received thousands of bullet holes in its ancient facade.
But no one touched the Roman ruins that lay beneath the former church and its courtyard. And no one suggested that these dignified old stones would later be sand-blasted into the 21st century, its foundations assaulted by bulldozers. In law, its restoration must be approved by the Lebanese Department of Antiquities. But the department’s archaeologists have not been admitted to the site.
Lebanon’s architects are an argumentative bunch — they’ve been complaining for years about the restoration of the whole of central Beirut — but about the Omari they are positively outraged. “Every historic monument has a soul,” Dr. Mousbah Rajab says. “They bear the mark of ages and the times through which they passed. But unfortunately, the rough way in which they are restoring the mosque has destroyed these marks, giving the impression that this centuries-old building was only built a few decades ago.”
Dr. Rajab is right. The pale-brown stones have been sand-blasted into modernity, the cheap cement packed around them — a mistake from the 1960s — cut away with electric saws. The bullet holes have been flattened out, and look now as if insects have eaten parts of the stone.
The archaeologists complain that the ravages of the war should have remained on the outside walls, since they are now part of the “mark of ages”. Which seems true: A Napoleonic cannonball remains in the wall of one of Cairo’s great mosques as a symbol of Egypt’s former colonial rulers. And who would dare cement over the shrapnel gashes from Luftwaffe bombs that are cut into the walls of the law courts on the Strand in London, or the base of Cleopatra’s Needle on the Embankment?
Youssef Haidar, the architect in charge of the Omari restoration, defends his work, pointing out that stones from some shell-blasted Ottoman rooms adjoining the mosque are being used in the restoration to replace some of the original Crusader building blocks which, according to him, had been shattered during civil-war bombardments.
Less comforting are the piles of Roman remains unearthed when bulldozers dug 35ft into the foundations of the courtyard. Beirut’s French-language daily, L’Orient Le Jour, asked the question on everyone’s lips: “Has another of Beirut’s archaeological sites been destroyed?”
As for bullet holes, the only ones supposed to remain in the centre of Beirut are in the statue of the Lebanese “martyrs” — the Muslims and Christians hanged by the Turks in 1915 for resisting Ottoman rule — which will be reinstalled in Martyrs Square with each bullet hole in the bronze lovingly preserved ... just in case anyone forgets that the foundations of the state are as fragile as those of the Omari mosque.
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Could Beirut have its railways back? Twenty-seven years after the civil war destroyed the infrastructure and fine old steam locos on the Beirut tracks, the city’s epic traffic jams are forcing the government to examine once more a $500 million French scheme to build a modern rail operation from Tripoli in the north to southern Lebanon. This would be a sleek electric train to race down the Mediterranean coast in the direction of Israel.
The ancient locos in the wreckage of the Beirut railyards — state-of-the-art rack-and-pinion giants built in Switzerland in the late 19th century — will be left to rot. Earlier plans to revive the system with restored steam locomotives — strongly supported by Syria, which has a number of working steamers itself — have been abandoned.
But so, I suspect, will be the latest plans. For who can build a railway costing $500 million in a country with a national debt of $32 billion? (The Independent)