Once Upon a Time…Lebanon?
As Lebanon continues its slide into the abyss, memories of its attractions are becoming distant for those who lived through its “golden era,” and are non-existent for despairing younger generations heading for the exits, conditions permitting.
The land of the cedars, once dubbed a welcoming “Paris, or Switzerland, of the Middle East,” is now likened to Venezuela with all its financial troubles, minus the South American country’s oil wealth.
The latest setback for Lebanese wishing to emigrate and escape a financial meltdown, rising poverty and unemployment levels, disappearance of medicines and food items, snowballing crime rate, dysfunctional pseudo government and an inability to handle a spike in coronavirus cases, came from the local airline that will henceforth require travelers to pay for tickets in “fresh dollars.”
The term, coined by banks that won’t let depositors access their foreign currency accounts or transfer them out of the country — if they still exist beyond computer listings — means new greenbacks sent from abroad that depositors can then withdraw and use.
National carrier Middle East Airlines (MEA), once the pride of the country and Arab region, is nixing local credit cards and checks because they can’t defray its international fuel bills, pay for aircraft parts, and cover maintenance costs and parking charges at airports, to name a few expenses.
It’s a far cry from 60 years ago when the airline published “Lebanon Fortnightly,” a useful supplement to its in-flight “Cedar Wings” magazine.
Journalist/editor Zahra Hankir kindly scanned and sent me a copy dating back to 1961 that triggered a bittersweet journey down memory lane.
I selected a few of its pages to feature. The contrast to today’s harsh reality is jarring.
In yonder days, the U.S. dollar could get you 3.15–3.20 Lebanese Liras.
Today it takes 3,900 (sort of officially) of that same local currency to buy a dollar, when it’s available, but it’s closer to 9,000 (and climbing, depending on the crisis du jour) on the black market, although the official peg hovered at 1,515 for years following the 1975–90 civil war.
There are between three and seven (mostly black market) exchange rates and the fluctuations are giving the Lebanese a severe case of whiplash.
The bank of choice in Lebanon’s heyday was Intra, which, detractors claimed, had grown too big for its britches and may well have been a prelude to the country’s eventual downfall.
Its footprint was in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Qatar, the UK, Switzerland, Nigeria and Liberia. The Jordan branches included Jerusalem and Hebron, before the Hashemite Kingdom lost them to Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War.
Intra Bank also owned prime real estate on New York’s Fifth Avenue alongside Rockefeller Center, on Paris’ Champs Elysées and in London.
The promotional blurb about Lebanon’s capital Beirut, comparing it to famous Mediterranean resorts in France, Italy and Spain, wasn’t too far fetched. Lacking the petrol wealth of Gulf Arab countries, Lebanon for decades relied primarily on tourism, banking, entertainment and real estate to fuel the economy.
It boasted of sea and mountains, allowing visitors to swim at its beaches and on the same day drive up to its snow-capped peaks in winter.
But that long preceded falling on acute hard times — exacerbated by a severe financial and economic crunch triggering a “revolution” in October 2019, compounded by the spread of the coronavirus, and culminating in a massive August 4, 2020 explosion at the Beirut port that killed hundreds, injured thousands, left countless people homeless and devastated a huge part of the city.
Wars and internal strife during that six-decade span also took a heavy toll.
“Life is pleasant in Lebanon,” said the MEA travel publication, noting that Lebanese food is delicious (true) and can be enjoyed with excellent beers and wines (true), but that European dishes could also to be savored and were cooked to perfection.
Sadly, several of the restaurants whose ads appear on that page no longer exist, having succumbed to the ravages of war, bankruptcy, or both.
Equally enticing to visitors were nocturnal pursuits in Beirut, whose famous nightclubs with live bands and shows, discothèques and bars catered to a wide range of tastes.
The nightspots in the ads on that page are also a thing of the past.
Long before luxury hotels mushroomed in other Middle Eastern countries, Lebanon’s inns were the region’s main draws, offering first-class service and housing favorite nightclubs, restaurants and pubs.
Of the 35 listed on the brochure’s hotels page, I recognized three that survived under their original names.
The 35 were serviced by MEA, whose schedule included regular flights to and from Nicosia.
I remember flying from Beirut to Nicosia before Cyprus was divided in 1974 following a Turkish invasion and the capital’s airport ceased operating. It was replaced by a facility on the Greek side of the island in the coastal city of Larnaca.
For years Beirut airport handled large numbers of tourists and Lebanese expats but they dropped sharply in 2020 and hotel occupancy plunged to barely 5%, the pan-Arab daily Asharq Al-Awsat reported.
A major summer draw — interrupted a few times by wars, and, more recently, Covid-19 — was the Baalbeck International Festival.
It featured performances by jazz giants Roy Eldridge, Dizzy Gillespie, the incomparable Modern Jazz Quartet, Oscar Peterson and the indomitable Ella Fitzgerald, as well as La Comédie Française, Britain’s Royal Ballet with Dame Margot Fonteyn, and Lebanese diva Feyrouz.
So much has changed since those exhilarating days. Even the international airlines flying into the airport aren’t all there anymore, and neither are some of the countries that were represented in Beirut.
A page citing useful addresses lists former U.S. airline titans TWA and Pan Am, the UK’s BOAC and BEA, Greece’s Olympic Airways, Belgium’s Sabena, Scandinavia’s SAS and Switzerland’s Swissair.
Among the embassies whose countries were mentioned and that have fizzled or been renamed and reconstituted are Germany (the brochure meant West Germany), the United Arab Republic (an ill-fated union between Egypt and Syria that collapsed three years after its inception), Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union.
Then again, Lebanon has also been transformed.
Its population has seen an addition of at least two million Palestinian, Iraqi and Syrian refugees in the interim decades.
A sizable part of its landmass has slowly turned into a concrete jungle and its infrastructure is bursting at the seams, thanks to years of shoddy patchwork, lack of urban planning, systemic corruption and sectarianism.
Some are questioning whether the country will survive a century after pre-independence Greater Lebanon was declared and whether they’ll end up saying: “Once upon a time…Lebanon?”