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Special Report
Tyre and the Poets
Lush banana plantations line the coastal route from congested Beirut to this ancient Mediterranean port.
TYRE — For $50 a family can take a safe, radio-call taxi from the congested heart of Beirut to the uncluttered ancient waterfront of Tyre, a few miles north of the border with Israel. Lush banana plantations line the coastal route.
People are all around, but only God knows how many there are. Among the many mysteries within which Lebanon veils itself is its population count. A weary, way-worn Beirut newspaperman, a Levantine Hildy Johnson, explains over many cloudy glasses of arak that, because of the religious “confessional” allocation of political power, it is simply too sensitive an undertaking to carry out a census anymore. The last time Happy Days were here so as to make safe an official headcount was 1932, under the French Tricolor and 16 years before proclamation of the Lebanese Republic.
The Lebanese attitude about census-taking follows the Epicurean sentiment of Horace: Tu ne quaesieris, scire nefas, or as it is said in a tawdrier time, “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”
Half an hour south of Beirut is Sidon, where, back in the day, the sainted Louis IX of France constructed a mighty castle and commanded Crusader forces for a few fleeting years. Today, like much else both newer and older in Lebanon, the castle has been blown to smithereens. With its sublime falafel, enchanting souq and caravanserais, this old town is good for a day trip. Sidon has come a long way from Saint Louis, but not in the right direction. It has not a single hotel worth an overnight stay.
Forty minutes further down the coast, past both Lebanese and United Nations military checkpoints, we arrive on a gravel beach fronting the Mediterranean in urban Tyre, at an old Ottoman structure framed solidly from gold-hued limestone. During the 19th century, in what seems a mischievous design of the viziers and dragomans, the building housed a maternity hospital on the first floor and in the basement a women’s prison. This year, beautifully restored and decorated, it opened as Yara Palace, a boutique hotel and restaurant. The former prison is a bar catering to the South Korean, Italian, and Tanzanian military men serving with UNIFIL.
UNIFIL stands for United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, but keep in perspective what “interim” might mean to the Tyrian mind. While working on his Histories, Herodotus traveled here in the 5th century B.C. for an on-site inspection. The locals told him their city at that time was about 2,300 years old.
The Western literary imagination is attracted to Tyre because it swirls amid the turbulent confluence of Biblical history and prophecy, Homeric and Virgilian epic, Ovidian mythology, and imperial extravagances of luxury and vindictive warfare. Tyre is the birthplace of real or fabulous personages including Cadmus, Europa, and Dido, the latter of whom colonized Carthage as others were to plant the Tyrian standard in Mediterranean ports as far west as Cádiz. The men who sailed with Columbus and colonized the Americas were descendants of long-ago colonists from Tyre.
With its expensive purple dye made from a local mollusk, the murex, Tyre was the center for the Versaces and Givenchys of the ancient world. Paris took Helen of Troy here on a shopping expedition to drape in sumptuous fabric the frame and face that launched a thousand ships.
King Hiram of Tyre was an ally and trading partner of Jerusalem’s King Solomon. Hiram sold Solomon the cedar timber for the great Temple.
The Jerusalem-Tyre relationship was rocky then as now. The old Hebrew prophets inveighed against the wealthy city and its neighbor, Sidon, as hotbeds of heathenism and vice. Jezebel, a Tyrian princess (and Dido’s great-aunt) who married Israel’s King Ahab, came to an unhappy end.
Egypt’s pharaohs many times made war against Tyre. Babylon under Nebuchadnezzar battered Tyre in the 6th century B.C. Some 250 years later, Alexander the Great already had established effective mastery over the entire Levant when he demanded to offer sacrifice at Tyre to its principal god, Melqart. Alexander maintained that he himself was divine because, he said, he was a descendant of divine Herakles, of whom Melqart was only an avatar. The Tyrians didn’t cotton to that.
When diplomacy failed, Alexander mounted a costly siege whose success resulted in the slaughter of thousands of Tyrians, deportation into slavery for the survivors, and ruin of the splendid city. Modern historians say there was no strategic rationale for Alexander’s destruction of Tyre and its people. The impulse for the genocide was something like the rage of a deranged, spurned lover. Is “education” the answer to war and the world’s other problems? Consider that the Macedonian sociopath had for his personal tutor the serene and rational Stagirite who wrote the Nicomachean Ethics.
When Jesus walked up the short road from Galilee to Tyre, preaching to the people and driving a demon out of a local woman’s daughter, he saw what Nebuchadnezzar and Alexander had done to the place, fulfilling the prophecies of, inter alia, Amos, Ezekiel, Zechariah and Jeremiah. He instructed his disciples to say to Galilean towns that rejected them and their preaching: “It shall be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon at the judgment, than for thee.”
Tyre, its glories, and its devastations have inspired much English-language poetry, not all of it great. The shakiest entry in the Shakespeare canon is Pericles: Prince of Tyre, a weak work slapped together in a regrettable collaboration between the Bard and some London hacks from a mediaeval tear-jerker, Apollonius of Tyre. The Gnostic Necromancer Simon Magus and his paramour Helen of Tyre, who lived just after the time of Jesus, are themselves the figures of fascinating legend. Longfellow was obsessed with Tyre, but being no Dante with Paolo and Francesca, he spoiled the story of Simon and Helen in a tedium of moralistic stanzas — “pious gurglings,” as Mencken put it.
On the other hand, some fine romantic poems inspired by the Greco-Roman past, without referencing Tyre specifically, capture its atmosphere. When Keats tells us what he perceives with his mind’s eye on first looking into Chapman’s Homer, it is something resembling Tyre.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (13) | Leave a comment
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Paul Kotik| 11.5.10 @ 6:50AM
Beautiful, evocative writing. The contrast between Saida and Tsor , especially. More such from poor, marvelous Lebanon, please, sir!
Clark| 11.5.10 @ 10:46AM
Not to forget the gardens of Tyre from Cavafy's Antiochus Epiphanes.
Al Adab| 11.5.10 @ 4:10PM
"...and all our dreams of yesterday, are one with Nineveh and Tyre."
Recessional, Rudyard Kipling
PELLIGRINO| 11.6.10 @ 7:57AM
Thank you. A very interesting article, as we seldom can find any real information, current information on what occurs in Lebanon.
Please do more of the same.
And include the perspective of what Lebanon looked like prior to the commencement of its destruction in 1980 to 1983.
I would gladly read about Lebanon's heydays and Beirut as the Paris of the Middle East -- accounts from those who lived there or visited extensively.
Perhaps some who taught at or attended the American University of Beirut.
I do not know for sure and my memory just cannot recollect. But I believe I always heard, "Beirut was like no other city in all of the Middle East" prior to its demise in the 'civil war' that commenced in the early 1980's.
As I vaguely now recall:
Beirut thrived. It was a place to do business. Big business. Fine shops. Well dressed people. Bustling activity. Schools everywhere. People from multiple cultures and faith groups living together in relative harmony. Successful newspapers and journals. A place to see and, yes BE SEEN. You just weren't a seasoned or true chic world traveller unless you could recount your experiences in Beirut and the countryside of Lebanon (like snow skiing there)....
In other words, a land and Mideast capital as antinthesis of what we know today. (And 1982 was probably when the exodus of the Christians began in earnest?)
Those who are truly in the know: Please get your articles on Lebanon, like this one from Mr. Joseph Duggan, to American Specator. We need to be reminded that the MidEast was not always the total cesspool we know today.
I really would love to read articles from someone who lived in Lebanon from the 1960's until the early 1980's.
Thank you.
Paul Kotik| 11.6.10 @ 1:18PM
May I politely point out that our friend Pellegrino has forgotten to remember that the destruction of Lebanon was largely accomplished by the Lebanese civil wars of the mid 1970's ? That the incremental damage done by the Israeli invasion of 1982 was rather small, despite the hilarious, indignant BBC TV news footage purporting to show buildings destroyed the day before by IDF artillery....though the rubble had 12-foot tall trees growing up through it? And I can assure Pellegrino that as late as 1984, when I left Lebanon, the South's Christian population was doing very nicely, thank you. That particular exodus began on May 23, 2000 when Israel finally withdrew and Hezbullah occupied all of the South.
Nice piece of dawa there, Pellegrino.
PELLIGRINO| 11.6.10 @ 3:32PM
Mr. Kotik, please. Please re-read my earlier post. I AM NOT claiming any good memory of these events (I am asking that others who have intimate knowledge of those times --- those who lived there -- if they might read in this Forum, I am encouraging them to comment.)
And we are talking about events that now date back 35-45 years. No, that is not ancient history.
But it is not as clear for me as, say, events in just the last 10-15 years.
If it did not come across in my earlier post, then please understand: I don't have clear recollections of that time. Only the memories of conversations with some Brits, Canadians, Amerians and other expats who left Beirut and Lebanon in the earlier 1980's for safer shores.
The overriding theme of those conversations was: Beirut had been a safe, interesting, thriving place. Lots of schools. Shops. A fascinating place to educate your kids abroad, to raise a family. Even missionary kids from across the region and Africa would be placed in solid, safe, boarding schools. The American U. of Beirut a great place to be professor, a great place to place your kid for schooling if abroad somewhere in the Middle East.
Those were the conversations of those who left hastily as all that evaporated rapidly.
I know that (with the 'power; of the Internet) I could try to again piece together events of those early 1980's. But bad things were happening. Great danger. And expats were abandoning Beirut in droves. Doesn't anyone else recall the world news focus on kidnappings that underscored the message, "Unsafe!" "Get out!" circa 1981, 1982.
Academics and clerics leaving a place they'd been for 2 or 3 decades. Parents immediately plucking their kids away to safer schools in mainland Europe.
I am hoping those in the know will post here to talk some specifics on just where, when, and how the rapid decline unfolded.
I have no political bent or agenda, Mr. Kotik. I wish every place on earth could be as benign, friendly, open, placid for both residents, tourists, visitors et al as say a present-day Vancouver, St. Louis, Dublin, Canberra, Frankfurt am Main, Heraklion, Auckland, or Zurich.
So it troubles me when world cities (as Beirut once was) and regions sink into despair. And I think it legitimate that we all ask why.
As to whether the South Christian population was doing "very nicely"....well, two of my Lebanese friends with whom I served in various capacities in the years 1989 and 1994, their detailed accounts told me differently.
News and Technology | 11.6.10 @ 9:27PM
it is extremely helpful & i got the required information
Naruto Spoiler
chris | 11.7.10 @ 9:21AM
Great , is great writing. The contrast between Saida and Tsor , especially.
I know that (with the 'power; of the Internet) I could try to again piece together events of those early 1980's. But bad things were happening. Great danger. And expats were abandoning Beirut in droves. Doesn't anyone else recall the world news focus on kidnappings that underscored the message, "Unsafe!" "Get out!" circa 1981, 1982.
Cupcakes Jakarta | 11.7.10 @ 11:03AM
Great , is great writing. The contrast between Saida and Tsor , especially.
I know that (with the 'power; of the Internet) I could try to again piece together events of those early 1980's
Dave Duncan | 11.8.10 @ 5:44AM
That evokes a places far removed from the world we live in, it is such a pity that such a historic city lies in ruins thanks to modern day warefare.