Lebanon - History and Ruins
Date: 19 February 2012 08:11:25
Tomorrow is 4 months to the day since I left Lebanon. Better late than never with the blog posts, I suppose. As I briefly posted here, I had a great time and loved it. If you have any particular questions on anything I post or any questions you have generally, let me know and I will try and answer as I can. Future posts will be on the cities, travelling around Lebanon, nature and religion, particularly Christianity and monasticism.
First up: history and ruins -- there is so much history in Lebanon, it is amazing in its scope and variety. And, thankfully, much is preserved though I am sure much is also lost. And for most of the ruins, you can climb up on whatever you like: crumbling or sturdy. While at first my mind shuddered at visitor safety implications, I will say it was great to be able to wander through, and over, the ruins. And, perhaps due to my visiting in October (out of peak season), or given Lebanon's reputation (unfounded as I saw it) or whether as my guidebook said sometimes off the beaten path places are not visited by tourist buses and most people, I often had the ruins to myself or only with a few others. Anywhere else in the world I am guessing people would be everywhere; and visitors would via paths, fences and admonitions be instructed to keep off the ruins.
From Byblos, thought to be the oldest continually inhabited city (~5000 B.C.), to the cities of Tyre and Sidon and their Roman (Tyre contains what is believed to be the largest Roman hippodrome, 480m in length and with an estimated capacity of 20,000 people) and Crusader ruins, to the amazing Roman temples at Baalbeck (in the Jupiter temple ruins there are 6 remaining columns each 2.5 metres in diameter and 20 metres high!), to the equally amazing yet less well-known and less-visited Umayyad 8th century city near Aanjar, to the beautiful mountain towns of Deir el Qamar and Beit ed Dine and the sumptuous 19th century palace there, through to the Crusader Castle of St Giles in Tripoli, to the (sadly) few Roman ruins still visible in Beirut, each area and its history captivated and amazed me. A sample of the variety is in the photos below; the current photos I've uploaded to Flickr are here.
