Old cities and Excavations

A few hours northeast of Beirut (as far as you can go in Lebanon) is a city called Ba'albeck. It encompasses some of the world's finest Roman ruins. I didn't make it this go around, but I fully intend to see it again next summer. I went once when I was a kid and into old things, like roman ruins. It was cool for me then. Since then I haven't returned. One particularly cool thing about Ba'albeck is that is was standing in nearly "perfect" condition until an earthquake knocked over most of the really impressive structures. The year: 1776. I'm not kidding. I guess that was the year that Lebanon knew things would be bad for a long time...

In any case, this post is not about Ba'albeck. I didn't go there. I've been trekking in downtown Beirut most of my "free" days. Today I met up with one of my math professor friends in downtown Beirut and tooled around some more. Something I hadn't done was to go into any of the cathedrals downtown. I went into two cathedrals named St. Georges. One for the Greek Orthodox diocese of Beirut, one for the Maronite Catholic archdiocese of Beirut. Both were exquisite! Both, were very old. In between them however was a sight that looked like a huge archeological dig. I don't know how I missed it. Apparently it's just on a side street in the freaking middle of freaking downtown Bei-f-ing-rut! I took some pictures(sadly not shown here) and realized that this must be something Roman again. It was at that point that I realized (being between two churches who have very long standing roots in this part of the world) that Beirut has really been around a long time! There are several places near downtown where such digs can be seen from major thoroughfares.

I began thinking about who has been here, and what they might have built. My guess was all the major Mediterranean empires (greek, roman, ottoman) as well as Genghis Khan <---- totally bad-ass and possibly some others. Well, that leaves a lot of mixing up of everything. Religion, politics, genepool... all got mixed by being conquered so many times. It has, however, left some truly fine sights to see. Part of what makes me happy to see such things is that most of the ruins don't have known stories and thus haven't been turned into tourist destinations. Another nicety involving these ruins is that from street level, they go WAY down. This speaks to the fact that Beirut has been conquered and rebuilt so many times. I think one sight near the port of beirut must go down nearly 35m (over 100 ft perhaps further, I couldn't see the bottom from the angle I passed by). I hope they don't have to deal with the conquering anymore, but it seems with today's political situation in the middle east it will at least have to be rebuilt (in part) again and again... (Harram!)