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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.
(Page 2 of 2)
When Poe compresses into a few lovely lines images of barks of yore, a perfum’d sea, the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome, and “regions which are Holy Land,” he evokes a place at the intersection of the Phoenician, Homeric, Attic, Alexandrine, Augustan, and Biblical worlds: Tyre.
Poe dedicates his great lyric “To Helen.” The moonbeams-and-magnolias herd of historians maintains that this poem was inspired by Poe’s adolescent crush on an antebellum Hannah Montana, 14-year-old Jane Stanard of Richmond, Va. Stranger things have happened, but the Stanard Version slights Poe’s classical education and the fact that his poetic artistry at its best is gently allusive, not leadenly didactic (as is Longfellow’s dreadful doggerel about Tyre). This may kill my chances of ever lunching again at the Garden Club of Virginia, but somehow I think it is common sense to discern in the poem allusions not to schoolgirl Jane of the Old Dominion, but to two great literary Helens of Older Dominions.
Our hotel proprietor tells us that the beach in front of us is where Saint Paul landed when he visited the Christians of Tyre in 58 A.D. Across the gravel lane from the hotel, my wife and I take thick Turkish (oops, Greek… no, make that Lebanese) coffee with the Greek-Catholic Melkite Metropolitan Archbishop of Tyre at his residence. He sits beneath a recent photograph of himself with Pope Benedict, whose primacy he recognizes. It is a weekday, and he has just celebrated the early morning Divine Liturgy with the Archbishop Emeritus and another priest…and six members of the laity.
“There are 500 Christians remaining in Tyre,” he tells us.
“Five hundred Christians and two Archbishops?” asks my wife. Perhaps too much perked up by the Archbishop’s brew, she exclaims, “Why, this is a place where you almost can have your own personal Archbishop!”
“Actually there are four Archbishops,” continues the prelate. “There’s also a Maronite Archbishop and there’s a Greek Orthodox Archbishop.” Each resides beside his little cathedral within a three-block radius in the warren of mediaeval streets in Tyre’s old Christian Quarter. The abundance of Archbishops in Tyre has something to do with its antiquity as a Christian community and the multitude of Christian rites in the region.
The roadsides of the region of Tyre and Sidon now are
festooned everywhere with iconic portraits, sometimes side by side,
of two men of magnificent rank and luxuriant facial hair, Sheikh
Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah and Col. Harland D. Sanders. 
The juxtaposition undercuts the
preoccupations of the Amriki who worries Why do they hate
us? while making more apt the conundrum, in the land of perfect
mezze, Why do they love our fast food? From the images of
Hezbollah’s chubby chieftain it appears he seldom tarries long
without a repast of potatoes mashed brutally in the Colonel’s
ineffable gravy, Southern home-style biscuits, and KFC Original
Recipe Chicken.
Ezekiel warned Tyre and its gods of his God’s angry threat: “They shall make a spoil of thy riches, and make a prey of thy merchandise: and they shall break down thy walls, and destroy thy pleasant houses: and they shall lay thy stones and thy timber and thy dust in the midst of the water. And I will cause the noise of thy songs to cease; and the sound of thy harps shall be no more heard. And I will make thee like a naked rock; thou shalt be a drying place for nets; neither shalt thou be built anymore.”
With a glance toward the vast remains of ancient streets and buildings submerged under the clear Mediterranean waters just off the city’s shore, it’s plain to see the prophecy came true. But after Alexander’s extermination of the original Tyrians and perhaps a kind of prophetic statute of limitations, new inhabitants began to build again and make music. As I stumble through the sprawling necropolis and Roman hippodrome, recordings of steam calliope carnival tunes blast from the boom boxes of a crowded Palestinian refugee camp hulking over the site. Is Bruno Anthony from Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train lurking behind the next Phoenician ossuary?
In the many villages of the Tyrian outskirts, expensive new dwellings, Mideast McMansions, rise on the hills. These are showplaces, built for proud visits home by Shi’a traders who make their fortunes in West Africa. The high probability of more military conflict, alleviated a bit by the lesser chance the owners will be home when it happens, does nothing to slow the construction boom.
Back in the center in an open-air workshop on the wharf where Hiram shipped his cargoes, an old man with an adze fashions aromatic cedar into a full size, seaworthy Phoenician ship, a bark of yore. His young assistant says the connoisseurs who commission their sailing ships pay them very good money. He adds that the stout cedar planks stacked at water’s edge are imported from Canada. Overharvested Lebanese cedar is an endangered species.
In a little place around the corner, next door to the municipal hoosegow, a man serves snacks and pours Almaza Pilsener from a tap. He lives in the ancient stone tower a block away. By night he is the lighthouse keeper of Tyre. He tells us with a quiet smile that more than once during the past three bellicose decades, he deliberately shut off the light to cause Libyan gun-runners and their consignments to dash against the shoals and join ambitious Phoenician, Greek and Roman projects in watery oblivion.
In front of a carpenter’s shop, a porphyry column,
sundered from its vertical role perhaps as long ago as Alexander’s
siege, lies prone in a bed of dust and coarse gravel. 
In Washington or Los Angeles it
would be a prized piece for exhibition at Dumbarton Oaks or the
Getty. In Tyre, it is cheaper than Ready Mix and rebar, and so it
performs humble service as a parking block, or as the British would
say and spell it, “tyre stopper.”
With keen aesthetics and keener pragmatism, Tyrians live according to a teleology that made sense to Alexander’s tutor: Function follows form.
(Mr. Duggan began writing for The American Spectator many and many a year ago. Since the summer of 2009, he has lived and worked as a writer in the Middle East, in a kingdom by the sea.)
Photos: Lucía Landa de Duggan
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.