Little gods
"I didn't expect all the Marys," I say.
It is our third day in Lebanon, and we have struck inland.
Our first sight of the lush valleys - the awadiya - has been shocking, the road rising almost vertically up from the lazy sweep of the Mediterranean coast to trace serried hilltops, switchbacking up and up and up, until we are skirting the hundred-mile length of the Mount Lebanon ridge above us.
And everywhere there are Marys.
They are in shrines on every bend of the road where it runs through villages and towns: blue-smocked figures locked behind glass, small candles and offerings padlocked in with them. Some are hardly the size of my outstretched palm, others are disconcertingly life-sized. One house has a four-meter-long hand-moulded grotto grafted onto its underbelly.
It is not exclusively Marys. There are also many black-cloaked, white-bearded figures, one hand held aloft. A quick consultation of S's phone reveals him to be Saint Maron.
"Who?" I ask.
"'A Syriac mystic and/or monk,"' S reads out. "Ah... wait. Did you see what he was holding? Was it a book?"
I peer back down the road. "Sure, maybe."
"Black cloak, white beard, staff: Saint Maron. Black cloak, white beard, book: Saint Anthony."
"And who's he?"
S consults his phone again. "A third-century saint and/or monk."
(Our Lebanese friend L later corrects us: more likely Saint Charbel, born Youssef Antoun Makhlouf. Black cloak, white beard; book optional).
Apart from the statues, there are the churches.
Churches in every town, churches on the slopes of the valleys, churches on bald promontories that look like forsaken corporate hotels or out-of-season ski lodges. Even one church constructed in the image of a giant, upright cross.
In the north of the country, walking through Tripolis, we had found ourselves among mostly Muslims, the skyline sketched with the delicate arabesques of mosques. At dinner in a restaurant I was the only woman with my hair uncovered. But there had been no overt show of religiosity that could compare with this.
At one bend in the switchback road, a giant plastercast Saint Maron (or Anthony) has been tipped over and lies like a beached aircraft, so large that at first we don't know what we are seeing, one enormous disembodied hand propped up on the boundary wall, to advertise the antique-shop-cum-junkyard upon whose roof the fallen saint has come to rest.
**
Lebanon's history has been shaped by its Christian minorities, many of them sects I had never before heard of: Maronites, Melkites, Armenian Apostolics. Their presence here can be traced back fifteen hundred years and wields considerable symbolic and mythic power, not least as a Christian toe-hold in an increasingly Muslim region.
All throughout the tiny mountain village of Douma we taste concrete dust and plaster, the whine of industry. Two great competing constructions of sandstone are still underway, immediately adjacent to one another and almost identical: one proclaims itself the Greek Melkite Church, the other the Greek Orthodox Church. I find myself thinking of Monty Python sketches.
**
If the mountains are the centre of Christian Lebanon, the Qadisha Valley is buried heart.
In the fourth and fifth centuries early hermits and mystics came here seeking solitude in the caves, founding monastic communities that still draw pilgrims today. It became a place of refuge for Nestorians and Ethiopians; the Maronites fled here, fearing the Jacobites; later the Jacobites hid here, fearing the Maronites.
We walk the Qadisha valley floor one morning, in the company of friends-of-friends. Monasteries have been built into the rockface. Before the road down here was expanded and resurfaced, it was an almost inaccessible place. In the winter, the snows came in.
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| A monastery in the Qadisha Valley |
In one monastery there is the desiccated body of a saint. We file in to peer at it.
Yet another thing I did not know before coming to this country: when the French Mandate gave way to Lebanon's independence, an
agreement known as the National Pact was struck between
these different religious group. The Pact has endured to this day,
with the top three governmental roles distributed across three
religions: the
Prime Minister is always a Sunni Muslim, the Speaker of the National
Assembly always a Shi'ite Muslim, and the President always a Maronite.
"Who is the president now?" S asks, when I attempt to explain this.
I hesitate, double-check the page. "There is... currently no president of Lebanon... and has not been for over a year." This is even now the case, despite a dozen attempts (and counting).
*
Then there are the Druze, a group that fits neither the category of Christian nor exactly Muslim.
We come upon them, like so much during our trip, by accident. We spend a few days in the misty heights of the Chouf Valley, where we visit the impossibly beautiful library in Moukhtara Palace, with its tables made from engine parts and beautiful French telescopes and original British plane-spotting searchlights from WW1. The family who own it, the Joumblatts, have been leaders of the Druze community for many generations. There are approximately 250,000 Druze in Lebanon, we learn, most of them in the Chouf area.
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| A (very small) part of the Moukhtara Palace, in the Chouf Valley. |
The man who shows us around the palace will accept no money for his service. On Saturdays, he tells us, anyone with a grievance may come to speak with the owner, a fifth(?)-generation politician with multiple assassinated ancestors.
"What do Druze believe?" S asks. Before coming, we had scanned the Wikipedia page that mentions instantaneous reincarnation and secretive practices, which can tell us only that they do not fast, do not pray daily, do not make pilgrimages.
"In humanity," is the answer we are given. "In logic and humanity."
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| Even the bathroom has a library in Moukhtara. |
Moukhtara was meant to be a stop en route to the much more fabled palace of Beiteddine. But the royal residence is almost a
disappointment, after that library. We walk the bare courtyards and overgrown
gardens and cavernous cellars, studying mosaics that are not particularly well-executed. There are fountains in every room, but all
are dry. The plaster is sagging and the velvet banquettes look dusty.
We drive home in the dark. In the twisting mountain roads, we come upon a spill of people, a Druze gathering in the streets of a village. There is music. There is laughter. The women all wear white half-scarves across their mouths, to startling effect, diaphanous and shifting against the black of the night.
*
In
Massa al-Chouf, a wet and mountainous hiker's rest almost abandoned in the shoulder season, we discover one of
the smallest wineries in the world. The proprietor wears an oversized stetson and
warmly ushers us around the two tiny subterranean rooms that are his fermentation,
casking and bottling facilities.
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| The mountains of the Chouf Valley |
Upstairs on the balcony we talk with him over the wine (mostly exported to Massachusetts and Connecticut), as he explains that he and his whole family fled the area in 1983, when Druze community members massacred over 60 Christian villagers. His uncle and aunt didn't make it out.
Why had he returned? we ask.
When is an easier question: following a peace negotiation that he was part of. The Druze family who had occupied their vacant house after the massacre was given compensation and moved out. All of this is told to us in the same matter-of-fact tone.
Did you parents come back? we ask.
"Only after they died," he says. "Too late for them. I brought them back with me."
Are you glad you returned? we ask.
He thinks about
that. "Some days, yes. Some days..."
There are no religious icons that we have noticed in this small settlement, just the mist that draws down at nightfall. That evening, we eat alone in the restaurant of our five-story hostel, built to accommodate two hundred absent guests.
Later, I look up the history of this place. The litany of skirmishes and counter-skirmishes from just 1970s and '80s are dizzying, the list of actors a puzzle I can't fit together. Tit-for-tat, revenge and counter-vengeance, going back in some cases a century, more. The Mountain War.
How do you move back into a house with so many ghosts?
How do you stay away?
Along the road out of the village the next day we notice a strange plot of land: it has a fence and a locked gate, but no signpost. Rosemary and lavender bushes are inter-planted neatly along what seems to be a paved walkway, leading nowhere. We have by now seen so many abandoned building sites that at first we assume it is just one more. But who is watering the rosemary? I ask, when we have stepped over the fence and stood on the paved stones. At the end of the path we find a flight of steps down into a blank, three-armed structure. There are candles on the bare floor.
On Google maps, when we examine it afterwards, the structure reveals itself as a long cross: the walkway the upright post, the below-ground structure the crosspiece with its intersecting arms. There is no name on the map, just as there was no name on the gate. Nothing to indicate who built it, or for whom. But the bushes are clipped and neat. Someone has watered the rosemary. Someone has replenished the candles. Someone remembers. Someone knows.
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