Article by Zachar
“I think I’ll just go out for a little and then come back home early and study,” I told my friend on the later side of yesterday morning. Someone I had met on the bus the day before had invited me to a local Lebanese craft fair in an area over the mountains called, “Taanayel.” I was thinking to spend an hour or so there and return. As the saying goes, “Man makes plans and God laughs.”
The first sign that this day was going to be different was the presence of the military and news crews in places I had never seen them. It turned out that the President of Lebanon had resigned a day earlier than expected, leaving the country indefinitely without a president. Not the best situation to be travelling across Lebanon in, but almost certainly nothing to worry about. Lebanese politics seems to be stuck in a highly dysfunctional rut and the country usually continues on without knee-jerk reactions to political situations.
As my mini-bus entered the mountains and the billboards of the President of Lebanon (or at least he was until an hour ago) turned into billboards of Bashar al Assad, I felt the pressures of city life fall behind me. There’s something special about the mountains in the Middle East. In Iraq, it’s where people go to survive the current situation. In Lebanon, it’s somewhat the same on a mental level.
Soon enough, I’d completely forgotten whatever had been on my mind in the city. After an hour of swerving through beautiful mountain countryside 40 kph faster than common sense, the mini-van stopped at the mid-point between Beirut and Syria, at the other side of the mountains in a city called Chtaura. Taanayel wasn’t far but I had been instructed to take a mini-van there, which I did.
This wasn’t the best move. Thanks to the obnoxious loudmouth driver, and my own obnoxious habit of happily conversing in Arabic with the locals, a crowd formed around me of drivers, beggars, and merchants, all wanting to know what was going on. Apparently my existence in this city was what was going on. Normally this would be fine, and I’m happy to meet everyone and enjoy the reciprocal curiosity. However, being in a city where billboards promoted Bashar al-Assad, this type of attention on me wasn’t fine at all.
Finally, my driver drove us onto the highway. Thanks to his passion for acceleration, I arrived at Taanayel in under two minutes. Once I walked down the dirt road from the main street, I found myself in another world. I didn’t realize how different Taanayel would be compared to anywhere else I had been in Lebanon. I had gone from a hectic dusty Muslim city to a Christian settlement in the middle of an expanse of forest and orchards.
I was still catching my breath from being surrounded by throngs of scruffy men and beggars shouting and joking around with me in accents I wasn’t used to, worrying about secret police and who knows what else. Now just a couple kilometres away, I was walking in a shady grove of pine trees growing among a cluster of church buildings.
Though I was still the only foreigner as far as I could see, no one seemed to notice. Along with Arabic, people spoke to each other in the other two native languages of Lebanon: English and French. Two rows of booths selling homemade preserves and crafts had been set up for the fair. Inside the church courtyard, large cages of songbirds and peacocks entertained families. Outside, a pen of a hundred black and white dairy cows ate calmly, eyeing the families passing them by.
After meeting my new friend, her sisters, and her mother, all of whom were making and selling delicious Lebanese food, she began introducing me to the sellers of the fair. It turned out that she was the vice president of the organization that had played a big role in setting this all up.
All the sellers spoke English with us well, so we were able to mix and connect easily. I couldn’t help but contrast my quiet complementary conversations about their craftwork with the brash conversations with the clusters of people in Chtaura which mostly revolved around them asking me how they could come to Germany, and me saying, “I don’t know,” and them repeating themselves louder.
After meeting everyone at the fair, my friend suggested that I walk around the lake outside of the church buildings. This place was already nice, but I had no idea what I was in for once I started walking towards the lake. The path that led from the church to the lake straddled a forest on one side and an endless sea of vineyards on the other. Families of various Muslim sects, as well as Christians and “foreign” ethnicities like Africans, all smiling and relaxed, walked or biked slowly down the path. The most notable aspect of the walk apart from the nature, was the lack of trash. In most non-Western countries, litter and endless piles of garbage are such a normal part of life that a lack of trash is striking.
I would say this place was like Europe, but it wasn’t. It was so much better. The trade-off between the Middle East and Western Europe is that the Middle East has happier, more emotionally stable, cleaner, and appreciative people; while Europe has more politically stable, cleaner, and productive countries.
In Western Europe a place like this is normal, but a kind of cynical glee for enforcing written and unwritten rules upon everyone can suck the joy out of living there. In Taanayel, the joy of being alive and being present in such a special place didn’t go unnoticed by anyone. It infected everyone and our collective appreciation of the place formed a barrier against whatever personal problems existed outside of the forest. Everyone’s face was lit with a smile.
All I could think was, “I knew it!” I’ve always felt that if somehow the Middle East could politically and economically stabilise as much as Europe, it would be a heaven on Earth because the people of the Middle East, whatever religion and ethnicity they are, make the life around them beautiful. If only the factors that made Tannayel a safe and stable place, could be replicated on a regional scale, then I would be the one begging for a way into Lebanon.
After my life-long suspicions of Middle Eastern potential were affirmed and my witts revitalized, I realized that if I left this Shangri-La immediately, I could get to the Ummayad ruins of Anjar and back to Chtaura before night fell. I had always wanted to visit both the Ummayad ruins of Anjar and the Armenian village of Anjar that surrounded them, but being so far from Beirut, I wasn’t sure that I was ever going to make it out there. However, after consulting the map with a fresh mind I realized Anjar was pretty close to Taanayel.
Almost immediately after leaving Taanayel, I was picked up by a mini-bus whose driver spoke a version of Arabic that I could understand crystal clearly. Only as I’m writing this I realize he must have been speaking with a Syrian dialect – the dialect I’m most familiar with. The driver was on his way to Syria, which was perfect because Anjar was only a couple of kilometres away from the border.
I told the driver to drop me off just before Majal Aanjar, a town that my 2017 guidebook says is sometimes controlled by al-Qaeda depending on which way the wind blows. I wasn’t sure of the current situation but it felt like the kind of place that was best to not linger. To be clear, Lebanon is a safer country than Germany if you discount the reckless driving, but hanging out alone at the border of Syria isn’t my idea of a good time. Thankfully the long dirt road heading away from Majal Aanjar that was on Google Maps existed in reality, and I happily turned down it towards the Armenian village of Anjar.
Once comfortable with my surroundings, I took in the view. Directly in front of me were the anti-Lebanon hills. On the other side of those hills was Syria, and Damascus was just 20 kilometres further. The road was silent and still besides the group of refugee children who happily played in some rubble and the pair of women that averted their curious gazes politely, as did I.
The road ended at a barrier of cement and boulders that nothing short of a tank could penetrate. I climbed over it to the total safety of the village of Anjar. From here, a street followed a grid pattern through olive orchards and then the beginnings of the village. The village itself was made up of large houses, walled off from the street. Fruit trees and children’s laughter spilled over the high walls.
Anjar has had a strange history. It was once a major trading city during the short-lived Umayyad Empire, the first of the Muslim empires. Nothing was rebuilt after the empire ended, something very uncommon in the Middle East. It wasn’t until over a thousand years later, in 1939, that it was re-settled by Armenians who fled Turkey during the final chapter of the Armenian genocide. In Lebanon’s civil war, Anjar was occupied by the Syrian military used as a closed military and intelligence base. Unsurprisingly, I can’t find any information about this period of Anjar’s history, but I’ve heard that it only opened up to the public sometime after the Syrians left in 2006.
My friend from Taanayel had mentioned that I should visit the churches of Anjar. Armenian churches were something special, so her words were all it took to make it my first priority. It’s the reason I came to Anjar from this direction, rather than the normal front entrance of the village.
Further down the road, I found a woman in heavy scarves and her younger brother or son sitting close to the front of one of the churches. I asked if the church was open in Arabic. The boy immediately started speaking to me in steady and perfect English, remembering each new word carefully after the last was spoken. Unfortunately, there wasn’t anyone to open the church at that moment, but meeting this boy and his mother(?) was better than exploring a building anyway.
As I made my way to the next church I saw a Korean family walking a dog. It wasn’t something I expected. 안녕! (Hi!) I said to them in Korean. That’s not something they expected. Luckily they could speak English because I’ve forgotten nearly all of my Korean. We had a nice, eloquent, conversation. They claimed to be missionaries out for a family stroll and I claimed to be a student exploring the ruins of Anjar. I don’t think either one of us believed the other. It was weird but interesting.
After getting some free locally-grown bananas from a market that was run by children who refused to let me pay, I finally made it to the ruins. The ticket seller (who did let me pay) warned me that they would close the ruins in twenty minutes. “I’m just happy I’m here,” I said. He found that very funny. It was an understandable reaction considering that during the Syrian occupation, Anjar was a place that some people never left.
The ruins of Anjar were incredible. Mostly uncovered foundations spanning a great field, but some reconstructed arches and walls gave a real sense of what this city must have been like. There were a few local twenty-somethings enjoying unsupervised mixed-gender relaxation and recreation. Other than them, I had the whole dead city to myself. At least for 20 minutes.
Immediately after walking through the main corridor of ruins, I reached a flat plain of ruined thousand-year-old houses and/or markets. That’s when the shots started, then a mortar hit, then more shots, and another explosion.
Before coming to Anjar, I read about how its location picks up the sounds on the other side of the hills. Thank God I had read that before coming here because it sounded like the war was happening right inside the ruins. It was loud!
I was surprised that the war in Syria was still going on so heavily. After more than 10 years what is left to bomb? Who is left to shoot? As someone who constantly follows the situation in Syria, I knew that there were parts of Syria still in a state of war, but these areas were hundreds of kilometres from Anjar. Whatever was happening on the other side of the hills must have been so mundane that nobody was even bothering to report it anymore.
The gunfire and explosions didn’t cease during the whole 20 minutes I explored the ruins. Despite understanding the acoustic phenominea, adrenaline isn’t an analytical hormone. While the ruins were great, my heart was beating a hair too fast for an educational experience. I couldn’t imagine living in Damascus and listening to that for ten years. How could anyone pay attention in class, sleep at night, or even enjoy a family dinner? Once I left the ruins and was back in the village, the sounds of Syria disappeared behind the mountains, and all I could hear was the wind going through the leaves.
I kept thinking of Taanayel, which was just as close to me at that moment as the war in Syria. What exactly had created the difference between the two? Both places had the same peoples, the same languages, the same geography, the same cultures, and almost the same histories; and yet one became heaven and the other hell. Ten kilometres away from me families from a rainbow of religions and cultures were walking around the lake, enjoying the sunset together. Ten kilometres away from me waring tribes were trying to kill one last person before the night fell.
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Some people think that my obsession with countries like Syria is because of something about the war and destruction. It’s anything but. I loved the ruins of Anjar, but I didn’t enjoy exploring them to the soundtrack of a failed state. I love it here in Lebanon because going to a store run by children who give you their goods for free is a normal thing that happens here, but I don’t enjoy that refugees the same age go to bed hungry a couple of blocks down the road.
The true face of Lebanese, or Syrians, or Iraqis, or Israelis, or Palestinians, or Kurds, or Assyrians, or Armenians, or Yazidis, or any other Levantine peoples that I’ve ever met, has the same smile of the people walking around the lake in Taanayel. It’s a smile I see a thousand times a day here in Lebanon, but never once in the news nor a Western film. The warm mentality of the Levant isn’t something easily explained, but it’s impossible to forget no matter how bad situations can become.
Going to Taanayel gave me a new perspective on the situation in the Middle East. It was a glimpse of the possibilities of what living in peace could bring. It was proof of the emotional prosperity that people of the Levant are born with, even if they rarely have the political or economic opportunities to enjoy their riches.
Both experiences of being in Taanayel and Anjar left me wondering what could be done to change more of the Levant into places like these. It’s a question often asked rhetorically and rarely answered with the consideration it deserves. Of course it’s not an easy question to answer, but somewhere out there is the answer.
Whenever I think about setting difficult goals, I always remember the speech John F. Kennedy gave when giving the country the seemingly-impossible goal of sending a man to the Moon. In his speech, President Kennedy said, “But why, some say, the Moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? …We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we’re willing to accept. One we are unwilling to postpone. And therefore, as we set sail, we ask God’s blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure that man has ever gone.”
As anyone dreaming of peace in the Middle East feels, to achieve that goal is as easy as flying to the Moon. However, in my deepest of hearts, I feel that this goal of peace is what always organizes and measures the best of my energies and skills. For the past ten years this is the challenge I’ve accepted, and have always asked for God’s blessing on this most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure.
Thanks so much to Raceel Alkhatib or inviting me to the craft fair in Beit el Mouzareh and the Taanayel area. Her Instagram is @payfye_oe . I asked her for more information about the organizations that created this modern-day Eden, and she sent me this :
@beitelmouzareh is an initiative by @arcenciel.aec agriculture program, whose mission is to empower farmers by bridging the gap that seperates them from consumers.
Beit el Mouzareh has been established to help small mouneh producers and farmers across Lebanon and market them under the Beit el Mouzareh/Arcenciel brand, and offers the farmers a market to exhibit their products.
In September 30 JCI participants from the NCYEP Competition @ncyep.jcilebanon and JCI Zahle Revolves @jci.zahle participated in Beit el Mouzareh.
Baghdad to Mars 