Three spectacular ancient cities.
Each on the crossroads of cultures.
I'm Janina Ramirez.
And I'm Alastair Sooke.
In this series we'll be discovering the artistic influences
that shaped the stories of Beirut, Lisbon and Baku.
Helping make them some of the world's most exciting destinations.
Hi! We'll delve into centuries of rich culture and tradition.
This place tells us a story that goes back two millennia.
And experience how art is reinvigorating the cities today.
We'll encounter breathtaking sights...
It's quite overblown, isn't it? It's totally overblown.
..and discover hidden gems.
Wow.
This episode, we're in Beirut -
a city you should come to prepared for quite a ride.
Right, we are off.
The capital of Lebanon is a city like no other in the Arab world.
A famously hedonistic joie de vivre
earned it a reputation as the Paris of the East.
It's the Arab world's most diverse city.
There are 18 recognised religious sects here,
a delicate balance of communities that's been a blessing,
and sometimes a burden.
Because, tragically,
in 1975, diversity turned to division,
and Beirut descended into a catastrophic civil war.
But this irrepressible place is bouncing back...
A story we'll discover through
some of the region's greatest artistic treasures.
This is a truly epic work.
What excites me as an historian
is how culture has helped people deal with a complex, troubled past.
It's brutal. It's brutal.
And I'm eager to uncover the role art plays
in forging identities
among the different communities and cultures here.
It's a wonderful thing. It's a whole world, actually, in one image.
It is a whole world. Yeah.
Welcome to Beirut.
To find out what makes Beirut so special
we're starting with a trip to the top.
This cable car connects the suburbs of greater Beirut
to the mountains above.
So we are heading up into possibly
one of the most significant and important
mountain ranges in the Middle East.
These mountains have shaped the geography of the city,
trapping it against the sea.
Just look how sheer this is.
I know. This mountain.
It really does provide a limit to where you can build.
We are going into the woods now.
Oh, my goodness me.
But their influence goes far beyond the physical shape of the city.
They've helped form its social landscape too.
It suddenly doesn't feel so safe now.
No. Oh, it's got a bit bumpy.
And we've not come all this way just for the view back down.
Yeah, OK, it will be quite nice to get on to, say, terra firma now.
The service has started.
Oh, my God, look at that building.
We've come to see this stunning Christian cathedral.
This is completely amazing. It's bonkers, isn't it?
So, this is the cathedral. Yeah.
Its shape is supposed to mirror, like, a Phoenician seafaring ship.
A ship! Yeah. I like these... What do you call these?
Ribs? Yeah. They're swooping up into the air. Looking out.
CHORAL SINGING
That's beautiful. It's amazing. Is that happening?
It's not a recording? No, no, this is mass, yeah.
This is the Cathedral of our Lady of Lebanon, built in 1968.
I've never been in a building like this.
This undulates down.
It's absolutely beautiful.
What's immediately striking about mass here
is that it's conducted in Arabic.
The congregation are Maronites -
an Arab Christian sect formed in fourth-century Syria.
Over the centuries, the mountains around Beirut
have offered sanctuary from conflict for religious minorities
like the Maronites and Druze Muslims.
And with so many different groups in Beirut,
art and architecture take on a key role
in how each community expresses its identity.
Helping make Beirut such an unmissable experience.
I'm not religious,
but I thought that was a really beautiful way
to begin our time here.
I just thought the space inside was phenomenal.
Absolutely beautiful, wasn't it?
I mean, the way that the natural light was in there,
and the swooping architecture.
It was just so stunning.
I found it a really interesting cultural experience
to sit through that mass.
The fact that it's in Arabic, the fact that it has...
Even the quality of the song has that sort of Arabic timbre to it.
It's worth reflecting on this, isn't it?
I mean, this is a '60s building, brutalist building.
It is bold, it's making a statement.
There's a strong sense of a community's identity, I think,
that's being expressed collectively.
The way it lays claim to the landscape -
it is right up on the top of the mountains overlooking the city.
It's a really interesting statement that's both religious,
but I think it will be possibly political, too.
Hi. Hello. Standing next to the church, with hands
outstretched towards Beirut, is Mary, our Lady of Lebanon.
Muslims as well as Christians visit here.
It's easy to forget that Jesus is one of Islam's prophets,
and that Mary is venerated in both religions.
I mean, we've got to get up there,
because that view is going to be spectacular.
This is like a mini pilgrimage.
God, it's bright.
There.
Well, there she is. But, I mean, check this out, as well.
That is incredible.
Worth the climb.
Where is... The city's right over there.
So this great promontory that goes into the Med.
This, it was a separate region, wasn't it?
But it's been absorbed into the city
as it sort of expanded outwards.
An Alpine view from a brutalist Christian cathedral
that's also a pilgrimage place for Muslims.
Lesson number one -
when coming to Beirut,
leave your preconceptions about Arab cities at home.
This is not what I expected of Beirut and, actually,
it's not what I expected of a Middle Eastern city.
Totally. Isn't that amazing, hearing the sound of mass
while we're up here? It's beautiful.
This is a magical way to start our trip to Beirut. Yeah.
To see Beirut's city centre up close we're heading to the Corniche -
the city's seafront promenade.
I do like being on the Corniche here in Beirut.
It's beautiful.
It's absolutely beautiful.
The Mediterranean Sea wrapping around the city,
it's warm, it's glamorous.
Look at this luxury. It's winter.
I know! And look at this, I mean, you know, and it's sunny.
You know, Beirut in the 20th century before the war
did have this reputation for being very cosmopolitan, very glamorous,
a centre of freedom of speech, you know, lots of artists, writers,
intellectuals congregated here in the city.
And I think that tradition has been picked up again today which,
hopefully, we can get a sense of.
What's kind of exciting for me is this tension
that I'm hoping to explore,
this idea of it as a luxury playground,
but at the same time, the echo of that side of Beirut that I remember,
the Civil War. We're going to see
all different sides of the city, hopefully.
What hits you exploring downtown Beirut
is a dazzling blur of construction,
and ultramodern high-rise architecture.
So transforming.
It is transforming. But every now and then you can see buildings
which are clearly still... Were devastated by war
and haven't been torn down.
The image Beirut wants to project is clear.
This city is forging a new future,
and the world better take note.
The ancient market, or souk, is the historic heart of the city.
But there's not much trace of its past left.
This area of the city is known as the Beirut souks.
Now, the name conjures up sort of bustling medinas of the Middle East.
But this is very Western-looking.
The sad reality of Beirut's old town
is that it was left in ruins by 15 years of civil war.
The devastation is appalling.
Street after street of damaged buildings.
At dawn today, bodies littered some streets.
And in the 25 years since,
everywhere you look has been rebuilt and repurposed.
But for many Beirutese the rebuilding went too far.
Hardly a trace of the war remains,
and you can't help noticing there are no memorials.
I'm looking for some history.
I'm not finding much.
As people say here, it's as if amnesty has turned to amnesia.
Around 20 years ago,
a pressure group emerged to preserve
some memory of the destruction.
And the result was this.
Beit Beirut, or the House of Beirut.
This place was an old residential block
that became a notorious sniper's den on the war's front line.
It's a building, a residential building. Yeah.
With eight apartments. That's a balcony. That's the neighbours.
So it's really very convivial.
There are people living really together in a strong way.
Youssef Haidar is the architect who was commissioned
to turn this house into a living memorial.
So it was always dealing with this building
like a living being and working in a healing process.
We'll just, you know, work on like surgeons - we heal the wounds.
And at the same time some part is missing -
let's say a leg or an arm or an eye -
we replace it by prosthetic elements.
Youssef's prosthetics have been
installed in neutral grey to keep the damaged structure intact.
Everything else is the original building, and the memories it holds.
So, we are in a residential apartment.
It used to be for the Falaha family.
Mm-hm. This is the kitchen of the family, with the sink and, you know,
the attic above and all that.
But look back there. Oh, my goodness.
Look. I discovered that this room
used to be the room of a blind woman. Really? Yeah.
It has been transformed during that period into a bunker.
So you are surrounded by concrete all around you.
You have one, two, three openings.
And look at that shooting range opening.
Oh. Which is totally crazy, because, you see,
it's a very narrow shooting range.
He shoots through the staircase, the balcony, reaching very far.
This is really a killing machine,
killing civilians living in their
kitchens, or going...crossing to buy some bread, or whatever.
I find this a really disturbing space.
Absolutely shocking.
Crazy. And the idea is to keep that, what I call, emotional trigger.
But the true horror of this room doesn't reveal itself until you look
through the sniper's firing hole from the other side.
That's where we were? Yeah, this is where we were.
So, it's only a very small shooting...
You don't see it, you know?
Generally, you are afraid of a tank,
or afraid of a soldier.
But you are never afraid of a door or of a house.
You know, the house in this case and the door
became a weapon and became a killing machine. It's chilling.
But because it's preserved in this way it's, like you say,
you're not reading it in a book,
you're not seeing it in a glass cabinet,
this is the space and it's still in its original setting.
Youssef and his team used
archaeological preservation techniques to conserve
not just the memories of the war,
but of the opulent home this once was.
The space is still inhabited.
You know, you feel that inside the walls, all around us.
Look at the drawings, you still see the traces of the frescoes they used
to have. And just above, you had that graffiti saying "Hell".
Also written by snipers. Hell?
Hell. We're in hell?
We're in hell, in heaven,
you know, it's always on these levels that things are happening.
And another graffiti which has a lot of meaning also for me -
"I want to tell the truth."
And he says, "I lost my soul in a second."
So, in a way, he's saying,
"Well, I lost my soul, I'm not human any more.
"I can go on killing."
Beit Beirut is perhaps the most emotionally
powerful piece of historic preservation I've ever experienced.
When you're in a space like this, it's brutal.
It's brutal.
It's a scarred building, but what I think Youssef has done so amazingly
is that he's not shied away from that.
He has treated it like a body, like something that is still living,
giving something back to Beirut.
It's unflinching, it's disturbing, it's moving,
but it's actually really beautiful.
I'm keen to see not just how Beirut has memorialised the war,
but how its artists engaged with the conflict at the time.
And in this gallery hangs perhaps
the most famous image to emerge from the conflict.
Abdel Hamid Baalbaki
was a Muslim artist who witnessed the fighting,
and this is his masterwork.
This is a truly epic work.
The beast of war, the monster of war,
and it has been known as the Lebanese Guernica.
I can see why. He did not really like Picasso, but it's fine.
Gallery owner Saleh Barakat knew Baalbaki
and has mounted a retrospective of his friend's work.
It was a very dark period,
and he had to leave Beirut because of the bombings.
And on the way to the south
he saw the village of Damour being burned totally. It was a massacre.
And that affected him deeply.
Consider that all those who are fighting
are really monsters and, in fact,
the real people who are paying the price are the poor people.
You can see here there's a figure actually aflame, burning.
Yes. But for him, in the back of his mind,
it was the whole city of Beirut that was being destroyed.
It feels like he's gone
for a deliberately timeless mythical effect.
These are knights in armour,
and you have these literal monsters and these
strange gloomy creatures of the night, this owl, this bat.
He came up with all these monsters,
you know, the people behind the wars,
those who financed the wars.
Abdel Baalbaki died in 2013.
You know, putting on such a big show,
it feels, in a sense, like a kind of act of love on your part.
I guess you must miss him very much. I respect. I respect.
Because one of the reasons I really wanted to do
this retrospective right now is that we owe him this.
Bread? Bags of bread. Oh, this looks nice.
It doesn't take long in Beirut
to get a sense of the lasting impact the war has had here.
Thank you so much.
Yeah, it's nice, cheese and herbs.
I have actually got this map.
The war split the city in two,
with the largely Christian East set against Muslim West.
The demarcation line between the two sides was called the green line.
This is downtown. So this is the Green Line, or was,
stretching all the way back up here.
It's a long part of the city that it stretches across, isn't it?
Yeah, it totally divides it, yeah.
Carving the city in two.
Some of Beirut's most precious art
itself found on the front line of the war,
and to relive the incredible story of its survival,
we're heading south to Beirut's most celebrated museum,
a route that follows the infamous Green Line.
This is Beirut. This is Beirut?
This is Beirut. This is the jewel of the Middle East.
Yes. Before the Lebanese civil war.
Our driver is Saleh.
Now we are driving on the Green Line.
The Green Line? Yes, this is the Green Line.
Our left, Christian areas.
At our right side,
the Muslim areas.
Every moving thing was a target for snipers.
During the Civil War it was a very dangerous area.
And the trees grew inside the road.
It was like a forest.
So it was an absolute no-go area
and the vegetation just took over?
Yes, yes. Wow. Yes, exactly.
We lost about 15 years of our lives
in that crazy war for nothing.
You get me back in memories. Yeah.
Yeah. We lost a lot of lovely people. We loved them.
Thanks, Saleh. If it makes you feel sad, I'm sorry,
because it's very moving, I can tell.
No, no, no, no, no. A few seconds I was sad.
Yeah. Yeah, you got it back.
Bring back the memories. You get everything from me.
Yes. All the emotion.
Are we good?
Shall we go?
Oh, wow, look at that.
The National Museum holds Beirut and Lebanon's most ancient treasures.
Beautiful building. It is.
Thank you. Hi. I love this whole Egyptian architecture.
I know, it's lovely.
Very, very busy, though.
It is, with a lot of kids, but great to see kids coming to a big museum.
I feel like I'm on a school... Have you got your packed lunch?
How are we doing this?
Well, I think you should look at Roman things, Hellenistic stuff.
I do like a bit of Roman.
I'm going to go earlier. I'm going to go Egyptian, Phoenician.
I'm going to head over that way. Phoenician? Mm-hm.
Beirut's recorded history starts with the Phoenicians -
a seafaring civilisation that built city states along the eastern
Mediterranean coast over 3,000 years ago.
Their artistic achievements were colossal.
Among them, the creation of the world's first alphabet.
Through the evolution of the 22 letters of the Phoenician alphabet,
it allowed the composition of words
that really reflected how people spoke.
And this was a revolution.
Every alphabet in the world today from Greek to Latin,
English to Arabic,
developed from Phoenician script.
Making these ingenious markings
one of the greatest feats of graphic design in history.
The key to understanding why Phoenician art was so rich
lies in the heady cultural mix it drew upon.
Something you can experience in my favourite room in this museum.
Wow. What an eerie space.
These sarcophagi were coffins for Phoenician nobles
from between the fourth and sixth centuries BC.
So clever to have the mirrors on the ceiling,
the mirrors here on the wall,
all allowing you these different viewpoints
from which to see each of the sarcophagi.
And, really, this is where you get a sense of
how different each one looks.
You can even see paint on some of them.
That's one of the things we forget about the ancient world,
is that we often see this pale marble
and we think it's all white and clean.
But, in fact, their sculptures were highly painted,
highly decorated.
The concept of the stone sarcophagus
was originally an import from ancient Egypt,
and captured in the features of these beautifully carved faces is
an unmistakably Greek sculptural style.
That could just come off a three-dimensional sculpture
from ancient Greece, and yet here it is,
the head on these wonderfully stark and plain solid marble sarcophagi.
Truly classical sculpture, and it really sums up, for me,
what a cultural crossroads this part of the world was.
But the final revelation entombed in these sarcophagi is the fact that,
while Beirut was a settlement in Phoenician times,
it wasn't yet an important city.
None of these sarcophagi actually come from Beirut.
They're from the surrounding city states,
and they show that ancient Greece,
ancient Egypt, were important in this area,
but it would take another cultural impetus,
another arrival of a new group of people for Beirut to be truly born.
It's the really curious thing about Beirut
that it's a very ancient city,
but for so much of its life it was essentially this backwater -
except, that is, under the Romans.
You saw this great expansion,
lots of wealthy Romans flooding into the region.
Temples were built. There were basilicas,
porticoed streets, forums.
Beirut was, arguably, the most Roman city of the Eastern Roman Empire.
Roman rule didn't just turn Beirut
into an important city for the first time. It also brought
the biggest religious revolution of late antiquity,
a great upheaval captured in this resplendent mosaic
from the sixth century AD.
It's known as the Mosaic of The Good Shepherd.
You have all of these different animals -
gazelles, a pheasant, ducks.
There's a bear, almost dancing.
Everything here is harmony and peace.
This scene is in fact a spiritual image,
a vision inspired by the new religion
adopted by the Roman Empire in the fourth century AD - Christianity.
And you can see the shepherd up at the top,
and the Good Shepherd was a symbol, an emblem of Christ himself.
It's a reminder, if you like, that Beirut
has been this very multi-layered place where so many faiths
have coexisted and replaced one another, and still coexist today.
What's so sad seeing it here on the wall is,
if you think about that image of peace, during the Civil War,
if you look down in the bottom left corner,
sniper fire has resulted in a whole part of the mosaic being lost.
In fact, it's a miracle that not just this mosaic,
but this entire collection, survives at all.
Because the war touched everything here in Beirut,
even its most ancient cultural roots.
In 1975, this museum found itself on the front lines of conflict
and the entire collection was in peril.
Anne-Marie Afeiche is the museum's head of antiquities.
She was part of a heroic act of preservation
that saved these priceless artefacts.
The museum was occupied.
I mean, we had a lot of warriors, I will call them,
from all the different parties, and militias, and armies.
As the conflict raged around the museum,
its roof was destroyed by shellfire,
and its walls used as cover for snipers.
Many artefacts were damaged.
Maurice Chehab, the director-general then,
decided to protect the big pieces he couldn't move...
Mm. ..by building walls and then covering everything
with concrete blocks.
The museum's artefacts lay entombed and encased
for 15 years of conflict...
..until, in 1995, the restoration of the collection began.
When these things were coming back to life, how did that feel?
So, it was constant emotion to be able to recover, to rediscover,
I would say, if you can say it,
the whole collection.
And thanks, God,
we have recovered the whole collection.
Why is it so important to keep these collections?
And what do they give?
You know what I would say?
Imagine how important a museum can be
with a whole collection telling the story
and the history of a country.
This shows, really, the unity of a people,
with a very strong message of national identity.
Extraordinary place, isn't it? It is. I mean, really great museum.
Yeah. It's a brilliant example of that Mediterranean, multi-layered,
so many different identities and cultures from the same area.
That is what it means to be from Lebanon, to be from Beirut.
with these columns behind us, you can see the bullet holes.
But they've filled in those holes,
yet they keep the echo of the suffering.
For me, the key to understanding the complexities of a place
always lies in its history.
And 2,000 years of Beirut's past can be charted
through a single building.
The grand Omari mosque in the heart of downtown.
It's the oldest continuously occupied building in the city.
This is precisely the sort of place that gets me excited.
I love spaces that are redefined over time.
They are time capsules for the city.
This place tells us a story that goes back two millennia.
The first people to build here were the Romans.
In the fabric of the columns,
you can see old reused Corinthian capitals.
They came from the imperial baths.
But there are even bigger surprises in these stones.
You can see from the architecture that originally, this was a church.
Very much Romanesque in style.
You can see that with these wonderful curved arches,
the little windows that are set into that
great barrel-vaulted roof up there.
This building was erected in the 12th century
by Christian crusaders that had captured Beirut.
In the 13th century, the Crusaders leave
and this becomes redefined as a Muslim space.
It becomes a mosque.
Instead of people coming in and moving towards an altar
that would have been up at the east end as Christian worshippers -
now, Muslims come in and they pray southwards to Mecca.
What a wonderful space.
Yes, it is. So much history in this building.
Yes. The deputy imam is Saad.
Many stages and many levels and many stories.
Yes. And many lessons.
And many lessons.
In terms of Christians and Muslims here in Beirut,
what is the relationship there?
Lebanese people, Muslims and Christians, live with each other,
love each other.
Yes, there was a civil war, but it's not for religious reasons.
Actually, it was for political reasons, OK?
It's really a bad memory, and I ask Allah, as Lebanese people,
to learn the hard lesson, and don't repeat it again.
In its early history, this site was the focus of religious wars.
But actually, I see it as a harmonising point
within the history of Beirut.
Beirut's densely layered history
shapes its cultural life in all kinds of ways.
Not least its contemporary arts scene,
which is generating a genuinely exciting international buzz.
And this gallery in east Beirut is hosting the latest exhibition
by Walid Raad - perhaps the most acclaimed artist in the Arab world.
His work largely deals with the legacy of the civil war,
often in surprising and subversive fashion.
His latest exhibition features a collection of photomontages called
Better Be Watching The Clouds.
You've got almost 30 plates on the walls in this gallery and they look
like they've come from the pages of some botanical, herbaceous textbook.
So what you find here are world leaders, local politicians,
regional politicians, international politicians.
And he's overlaid their heads
onto small images of different types of plants,
creating a very surreal effect, very whimsical effect,
and all sorts of jarring and perhaps satirical moments.
Over here you've got Margaret Thatcher,
greyish pubescent plant, rough pappus, disc holds bristles.
And, of course, the background at the bottom is Tory blue.
By giving that absurdist, jokey,
whimsical tone to the work, he perhaps
is encouraging a new generation of Beirutese, Lebanese,
to think about the civil war, to talk about it openly in a way that,
in the past, in the immediate aftermath of the war, simply,
for whatever reason, wasn't possible.
Visual art in Beirut isn't just confined to galleries.
It can also be found on the streets.
A new generation of young artists
are looking beyond the past to create
images all Beirutese can relate to.
You go first.
Sure, sure. Are we about to cross here?
Just one second. Yazan Halwani is one of them and we're in Hamra,
traditionally a Sunni Muslim area in west Beirut,
with a thriving cultural scene.
Artists, poets, painters,
journalists that used to sit in the cafes of Hamra.
But no longer? But no longer.
After the Civil War, what happened
is that it became much more commercial.
You had, I think, a spur of banks that opened.
I've brought you to see actually this mural right there.
Oh, so this, this is you?
This is mine. Wow.
OK. Who is this grand lady?
So, this is Sabah.
She is a singer, actress,
that was a cultural icon in Lebanese modern history.
SHE SINGS
Sabah was a Beiruti singer and actress who was hugely
popular across the Arab world in her heyday during the 1950s and '60s.
She was really loved, but at the same time,
by society's conservative standards,
she was not a very moral person.
She married seven times,
even marrying someone 50 years her junior at some point.
She was the Lady Gaga before Lady Gaga.
She came from a Christian community.
But at the same time, she used to be loved everywhere.
She's one of the few figures
able to transcend sectarian cultural barriers.
Is that a subject that interests you?
What I can do in the public sphere is create artworks that create
some sense of unity, or in search of a national identity.
I've got to say, she sounds like an utterly enthralling figure.
Why did traditional people love her if she did all those things?
I think this is something about Lebanese society,
is that sometimes in the private sphere they're really hedonist,
but in the public sphere they're much more conservative.
I'd love to know how you've actually,
technically how you've done this.
I really try to paint using Arabic calligraphy.
The meaning is not at all in anything I've written
because I've written nothing. It's purely in the shape,
the stroke and the movement of the Arabic calligraphy.
I'll tell you what I like about it, is the effect -
it's almost like in Christian art with a halo around,
like a saint or an angel.
Clearly, she is, you know, like the soul,
if you like, of Lebanon, of Beirut.
I think the soul of Beirut is in, right now at least,
is this eternal quest for finding the soul of Beirut, right?
You cannot really peg any identity on it at the moment because...
..it's in transit.
The difficulty in pinning down a single identity for Beirut
is a product of the many waves of cultures
that have washed through here.
But to get a sense of the mark the city leaves
on its many immigrants, I'm heading to Bourj Hammoud,
a district established by Armenian refugees.
Crossing over what's left of the main river in Beirut,
it's a point where there's a definite change
in the style of the city.
The Armenians arrived here fleeing persecution
by the Ottomans in the 1920s.
I like this.
More rough and ready. This has got character, this area.
Although rough around the edges,
like everywhere I've been in Beirut,
Bourj Hammoud is incredibly friendly and unthreatening.
Hi!
Armenians have a reputation in Beirut for their craftsmanship -
especially their jewellery making.
There's just so many jewellery shops.
You see them one after the other,
and this is so wonderful because it shows
that when these people came here to Beirut
they brought their skills with them, their craftsmanship.
Do you have anything you can show me
that's very much of the Armenian tradition?
Oh, yeah, of course. This is the logo, or if you want, like,
the symbol called the tashnag.
It's all everywhere, in every country
that there's Armenian refugees.
It's everywhere. And the idea that the jewellers
are making it wherever they are. Oh, thank you.
This is the Armenian letters. This is the Armenian alphabet.
Oh, gosh, look at those.
Every Armenian everywhere in the world still
speaks the language. It's written in Armenian.
It's the Our Father who art in heaven, but the Armenian version.
In Armenian. Yeah.
All these were made by Armenians in Beirut.
Amazing skills. It's all handcrafted.
That inherited craftsmanship.
Oh, yeah. That skill that came over.
Every Armenian person has to know some kind of skill.
At least they work in cars, shoes,
they're either mechanics or jewellers,
they work with their hands.
You barely find an Armenian who doesn't
have a certain skill he can use anywhere in the world.
Buried in the heart of Bourj Hammoud is something special.
There they are. An Armenian cultural centre and cafe called Badguer.
It's a hothouse for traditional Armenian arts and crafts,
and the perfect place for a coffee.
Arpie Mangasarian runs the centre.
Her parents, Marie and Nubah, are both 97 years old.
97!
Yes. That is bread.
And this is the pumpkin.
They are a living connection to the persecution
that drove so many Armenians to Beirut in the 1920s.
They expelled Armenians from their homes.
My father from Istanbul was expelled.
Nobody remained in the village.
They stole whatever they had, they left.
Everybody knows now what happened to Armenians.
They have suffered on this small Earth.
The world is suffering.
When the Armenians arrived in Beirut
the land they were granted in Bourj Hammoud was desolate.
In 1928 here, it was a wasteland.
Armenians came, life was very hard
for them - sickness, malaria, death.
So they came and they started to build their houses.
Protect themselves.
Mama.
This is my turn. My turn to talk.
Can I continue?
OK. You continue.
OK, continue.
The community built itself this area,
Bourj Hammoud, we create from nothing,
jobs, from nothing, items.
Do you feel, then, that Beirut has been good for Armenians?
Beirut gave us that opportunity.
We have all our culture, the Armenian culture,
and we have our Lebanese belonging,
our Lebanese specificity.
So a person with two hearts, if you want.
In less than a century, Bourj Hammoud
and the Armenian community have become indivisible from Beirut,
and the city has given the survivors of a terrible persecution
the opportunity not just to survive, but to thrive.
Oh, my gosh!
This is life. You were dancing!
Well done. That was amazing.
You're wonderful. That was so good.
Oh, gosh.
Be happy. There's nothing better than this.
I can't tell you what a joyous experience that was.
It felt so familiar.
I am of Polish origin and my family, too, they were displaced,
they were relocated,
and they took their Polish identity with them to the UK.
The idea that the Armenian community left home,
that they were able to come to Beirut
and recreate that sense of identity
here in a city that is, it seems,
open to all sorts of different types of people.
The Armenians arrived in Beirut when it was under French rule.
I want to explore the story of the French era here in Gemmayzeh,
a neighbourhood which I'm told is best navigated on foot.
HORNS BEEPING
I love that soundtrack in Beirut which is the car horn.
Someone said that Beirutis have their own,
almost vocabulary of car horns.
There are different noises. Some are angry. Like that one.
BEEP BEEP BEEP "Hurry up, I need to get past."
Sorry.
Sorry, please. Some are much friendlier.
They're quick, little - like a taxi driver
who's checking out if you want a ride.
He just goes beep and then you can jump in.
The French legacy is easy to see here from street level.
One of the cliches about Beirut, of course,
is that it's the Paris of the Middle East.
And I've just spotted these tower blocks here,
these apartment buildings.
They were constructed during that period of French governance here in
Beirut, the French mandate.
And they do have that very elegant Parisian feel
with balustrades and balconies overlooking the street.
France took control of Beirut after the First World War,
and ruled the city for nearly 30 years.
And in this rather bland building is
a breathtaking way of experiencing that period.
The Arab image foundation is a unique archive
of more than 600,000 images from across the Arab world
stretching back to the 1860s.
Oh, wow.
We have professional photography, amateur photography, family albums.
Family albums as well? Family albums.
Mark Mourakech is the foundation's director.
So now I'm going to show you a very interesting collection.
Among the many unique albums and images here
is a window into the world of French Beirut.
So these are very delicate.
These are glass? Mm-hm.
They were taken by a French doctor
who came to live in Beirut between
1908 and 1946.
Eugene Coutard.
So, this is like... You should be very careful.
Yeah, I will be very, very careful.
It's sort of binoculars onto the past.
Oh! It's a really wonderful thing.
It's a whole world, actually... It is a whole world. ..in one image.
Yeah. Yeah. Feels like I could walk through into another dimension.
Dr Coutard's stereoscopic photography
charts the story of a love affair.
Of not just how he fell in love with Beirut,
but also how France did along with him.
When he arrived in Beirut he wasn't very happy being here.
He didn't feel welcome.
He didn't feel at ease.
And bit by bit, and through photography,
he started discovering the city.
Coutard's early images of Beirut are of inanimate buildings taken from a
distance, mirroring the alienation he felt in his new surroundings.
But as the years went by, the doctor found himself
drawn into the life of the city. It's a self-portrait.
So here's the man himself coming out.
Yes. Bazar au fromage, June 1911.
Cheese market. Yeah, exactly. He's in the cheese markets.
Can you see him? Can I see him?
I absolutely can see him.
He's looking straight at you.
He's in the middle and he's got a bowler hat,
and he's dressed differently to everybody else.
It feels like I'm in that souk.
And this is how Beirut actually grew on him.
He discovered these things through his photography.
The next photo shows his wife, Alice Coutard.
Great, OK, the story develops.
Yeah. She's wearing this utterly over-the-top hat.
That's fascinating because with both him and her,
they're placed right in the middle of the action.
They're sort of saying, "We're here, part of this community."
This is so special as an archive
because the fact that this is over a century old,
and you're taken to that moment, is magical.
It's actually why these materials are preserved,
in order to better understand the past and go into the future.
Like Dr Coutard, France had its heart captured by Beirut
in the 1920s and '30s.
French visitors and immigrants poured in,
and the city became known as Petit Paris - Little Paris.
I'm curious to see how this influx of European modernity
intermingled with the city's Arabic and Islamic traditions.
And this magnificent mansion is the place to do that.
It was built in 1912 by Nicolas Sursock,
the scion of a Greek Orthodox business dynasty.
When Nicolas died in 1952, he bequeathed his home to the city
as a museum and art gallery.
I think if you really want to understand the individual
behind this magnificent palace,
where better to start than his private study?
The study of Nicolas Sursock.
Nicolas was a Francophile patron of the arts,
and this lovingly preserved study
gives us an intimate sense of the Europe-facing side of his persona.
And that's an impression that comes through
in so many of the objects here in this room.
You've got this record player.
Personal things like his glasses.
I love this. Different sets.
Over here on the shelf are cologne bottles.
Now, it's said that Nicolas actually commissioned his own scent,
his own cologne, and there's still just a slight fragrance there.
Something so tangible.
In here you get a sense that Nicolas
and the city itself were looking to the West,
embracing its art and its culture.
But it wasn't just looking westward,
it was also looking to the East.
This magnificent reception room was the salon de arab.
Very magnificent, very grand,
perfect for entertaining Nicolas' guests.
The decoration achieves this grandeur
by emulating the shapes of great Ottoman-style buildings.
In the centre, you have this fountain,
and it allowed guests to be drawn
into this more private seating area.
They could huddle together.
And then if two people were whispering here,
the sound of the fountain would drown out their conversation,
so anyone on that side of the room
wouldn't be able to hear what they were talking about.
These two rooms symbolise how European modernity
and Arabic tradition could coexist
so comfortably in early 20th-century Beirut.
Now, in 21st-century Beirut,
a new generation is helping to shape the city's future.
And in the vanguard
is someone who's made an unmistakable contribution
to Beirut's skyline.
A man who's part architect, part provocateur.
He's a kind of visionary genius.
His architecture that I've seen images of,
it's work that feels enormously daring,
sometimes slightly overpowering, very theatrical.
This is the studio of Bernard Khoury,
a man with a master plan to reshape
not just how Beirut looks, but how it lives.
So I'm here to see Bernard.
Yeah, I think you're a little early,
but I think he should be coming up right now.
Much like his buildings, Bernard is a high-impact kind of guy.
Bernard, hi. This is amazing, can I say?
Is this how you always come in?
Yes, I drive to my desk.
OK, shall I run after?
Yes. Is that how it's going to work? Yeah. Oh, my God. Right.
I feel like I'm meeting
an environmentally friendly Bond villain.
I'm not so environmentally friendly.
But the Bond villain, you're going with?
So this is the studio?
We have a lot of toys here. This is like a sort of toy shop.
Yeah. That's a kinky coffee table.
Kinky coffee table? Can you get in it?
This was moulded around the faultless body of a dear friend.
Anyone who dares to...
Yeah. ..to fit in the mould.
This is now a challenge, isn't it?
If she does not.
Bernard's striking aesthetics are always matched
with striking ideas,
and his latest work is a response
to what he sees as the haphazard and anti-social way
that the city's residential zones are developing.
Beirut is a city that evolves in the absence of a master plan,
and that obviously creates a bad urban fabric.
His proposal for a better future
is the most extraordinary block of flats I've ever seen.
The building's exterior,
stretching for more than 400 metres, is almost entirely glass,
creating an incredible sense of openness to the outside world.
Bernard, what I hadn't realised is just how narrow this building is.
I mean, if you stand here, this feels like the prow of a ship.
A warship. A lot of people look at it as a black, mean-looking ship.
But I don't think it is. I think it's a very friendly animal,
though beware of appearances.
Can we climb aboard? Yeah, let's go.
Flats in here are going for millions of dollars apiece.
So this is yet, obviously, to be sold, or people haven't moved in.
But, wow, this is a really airy living space.
I'll tell you what I love, though, here,
because this is the sort of prow of the ship, if you like,
and this is when architecture can be so invigorating.
That's such a sort of strong arrow,
it sort of takes you towards seeing Beirut over there.
The concept behind this astonishing block is
Bernard's reaction to those Beirut property developers
who erect towers without considering their neighbours.
So you call this sort of architecture hostile.
Yeah, the typical developer's recipe led to very sealed,
closed environments that have generated, in my opinion,
not only bad urban fabric
but, I think, a bad social fabric.
To what extent, then, is this building
almost a reproach to the way that people have been building
in a madcap, scatterbrain fashion in Beirut?
We've done exactly the opposite.
This building is completely permeable.
It is completely open, 360 degrees,
all around, creating a friendly,
non-hostile situation to all our potential neighbours.
And why? Is that just because you are a contrary personality,
or because philosophically you want to try and...
Because I'm a nice person.
And forgive me for being so prosaic about it,
but the friendliness of the building
is because so much of it is glass,
the people who live here literally will be looking, forced to interact,
confront their neighbours.
The whole periphery of the apartment is a bar, literally a bar.
This is not a handrail. It's a bar.
You can eat on this, or drink.
Mm-hm. So, the idea is that, potentially,
you will have your breakfast or your dinner
facing your potential neighbour,
and if she or he is good-looking or friendly,
you will have a friendly or a nice relationship
with your potential neighbour.
Pretty soon, there will be neighbouring blocks
constructed all around Bernard's apartments.
If his concept works,
they will all be built with a similarly open and friendly design.
You're saying architecture actually can influence
in a really serious level, at society level,
the way people behave?
I would like to think so, yes.
Bernard's apartment block is like, I don't know,
a black galleon of hope ploughing its way
through Beirut's urban landscape
on a voyage to a more neighbourly future.
Although I'm not convinced eating my lunch
in front of 300 neighbours every day totally appeals.
What is for sure, though,
is that our time here is almost over,
and there's one last side to Beirut's culture we need to sample.
Because, if anything, this city's heart beats even louder after dark.
Mar Mikhael is one of the city's many nightlife districts.
Alcohol is legal, and looking cool and glamorous appears mandatory.
Unless you're two British art historians.
Radio Beirut is one of many hang-outs here
and its manager is Jihad Samhat.
There are loads of people drinking.
Yeah, it's the quiet before the storm.
Oh, my God.
This is the quiet? Yeah, yeah, because, you know, it's still early.
What sort of people come to the bar?
Everybody and anybody who's in Lebanon
could be on this street right now.
Orthodox, Catholics, Maronites,
you have Muslims who are either Sunni or Shia, or
Druze and many refugees - Palestinian, Syrian.
I met this street artist who said that Beirutis
traditionally have a sort of inner hedonism -
that's how he put it.
It kind of feels like it's now an outer hedonism, right?
Lebanese people love to drink, love to dance, love to eat,
love to have a good time, no matter what's happening.
A day in Beirut is enough to totally transform
how you think about the Arab world.
This is an amazing place to end our day, you know,
rooftop terrace overlooking the centre of Beirut, and, I think,
quite symbolically, behind us, we have two enormous structures,
both religious - one a mosque and one a church.
All these different people living together on top of each other,
all these layers and those two poles
of... It's completely westernised on the one hand,
and very Middle Eastern and, seemingly -
to use a rather dread word - exotic on the other,
you can't really resolve that paradox.
Mm. They are working out a sense of identity.
They're trying to connect back with the past and make sense of it.
That's an important role that art has to play in Beirut.
That is what is so damn thrilling about this place. Yeah.