The light is high and the temperature low as we wander the remains of Heliopolis, the great ‘Sun City’ of the Roman Empire, on a late November afternoon. A little boy in Nike trainers scuttles past, grasping a concertina of postcards. ‘Want them?’ he approaches an elderly European couple trying to make sense of an archaeological site plan, ‘I’ll give you good price.’ Aside from the boy, the couple, and us, there are few visitors about.
Here in Baalbek, perhaps best known in recent years as the home-base of Hezbollah, Lebanon’s militant ‘Party of God,’ the past and present collide as intoxicatingly as the effects of the notorious marijuana and opium crops covertly cultivated in the surrounding countryside. On Khalil Mutran Street, heading down from the spectacular 2,000-year-old ruins into the heart of town, a woman in tight blue jeans and stiletto boots sweeps the pavement outside her lingerie store. Stout girdles, battleaxe brassieres in manifold shades of beige, and a skimpy black lace suspender belt grace the window display.
A European football match roars out from tinny speakers inside a falafel shop, packed with young men consuming shwarma sandwiches and Coca-Cola. A woman in headscarf, floor-length coat and veil hurries past an ornate Ottoman-era facade, dragging a ringlet-haired toddler in a Dora the Explorer tracksuit.
But beneath Baalbek’s modern surface, with its hole-in-the-wall French pâtisseries populated by neat old men in pinstripes, frantic traffic cops and market stalls filled with plastic Chinese-manufactured toys, beyond the fluttering yellow Hezbollah flags with their distinctive green insignia – a clenched fist brandishing a rifle – an older, quainter, hidden Baalbek lives on.
Situated almost equidistant from Beirut and Damascus on the high Bekaa Valley plain, Baalbek’s temples have been a pilgrimage destination for some two millennia. A more recent visitor, the belligerent Mark Twain, recorded his own impressions in the 1869 book The Innocents Abroad. ‘At eleven o’clock,’ he wrote, ‘our eyes fell upon the walls and columns of Baalbec [sic], a noble ruin whose history is a sealed book. It has stood there for thousands of years, the wonder and admiration of travellers; but who built it, or when it was built, are questions that may never be answered. One thing is very sure, though. Such grandeur of design, and such grace of execution, as one sees in the temples of Baalbec, have not been equalled or even approached in any work of men’s hands that has been built within twenty centuries past… A race of gods or of giants must have inhabited Baalbec many a century ago.’
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