April 13: Trek on the Civil War Anniversary
Tuesday. We went to Qadisha with Liban-Trek yesterday. Two buses, one for level 3, one for level 5, both full. There was no room for us on Level 5, so we took the Level 3. We drove into the North Lebanese mountain landscape east of Tripoli; the strata folded and warped as they were pushed up, then cut through by rivers and gorges. Past the small crusader castle at the mouth of the Qadisha valley, the moonscape of the quarries serving the Chekka concrete works, up through towns and villages, and finally down a tiny, vertiginous road that was much too small for our bus.
From there, we walked down to the Qannoubine monastery and church and the shrine of Saint Marina. Took a wrong turn at one point, and ended up at a very pretty overlook, but we had to backtrack a bit. Something else that's funny about these Liban-Treks – most of us Finns get something drilled into us at a very early age. It's often expressed as a stupid rhyme that can be roughly translated as
Do not shout and do not scream
Do not disturb Nature's dream!
In other words, that you're supposed to behave in nature like you behave in church – quiet and respectful.
They haven't heard of this in Lebanon. People tend to be noisy, especially on the easy bits of the walk. They sing pop songs, shout to each other, what not. This time, our guide first explained to us that the house just down the gorge is one where Liban-Trek often overnights. “Let's see if Abu Charbel is at home!” And he proceeds to yell at the top of his lungs “YA BOU CHARBEL! YA BOU CHARBEL!” and promptly replies an equally enthusiastic reply “YA MICHEL! ANA HOUN!”
I'm pretty certain that most of the length of the Holy Gorge of Qannoubine – a word that's an Arabized version of “koinos bios,” which gave us the word “cenobite,” which is a monk that lives in a monastery --, reknowned for its lush forests, steep cliffs, monasteries, hermitages, and other places of meditation heard that Abu Charbel was at home. Oh well, when in Rome...
The Qannoubine monastery used to be the center of the Maronite church for about 400 years; ever since they displaced some older hermits there, until they relocated to their current digs in Bkerke. It's a small warren of caves with some vaults and masonry added; the chapel is accessible to the public, but the rest was closed at this time. Some pretty but rather decrepit frescoes depicting the Christ, the Virgin, and a whole bunch of men with beards and rather interesting triangular halos. A very special atmosphere, there. Joanna says that in order to really understand the Maronites, you have to visit places like this. There's something to that notion, I guess.
The shrine to St. Marina is a very simple affair – just a niche in the cliffside with a chapel built around it. Marina's story is rather interesting, I thought. It seems that a man wanted to join the monastery, but he had a daughter, Marina, whom he needed to care for, and obviously the monastery wouldn't take girls. So he disguised her as a boy, called her Marino, and in they went. Many years later, a girl in a nearby village got pregnant, and accused Marino of the deed. The village elders declared as punishment that Marino would be exiled from the monastery and would have to care for the baby. So (s)he took up digs in a tiny cave nearby, and lived the life of a hermit there. Eventually (s)he died at a very ripe old age. The monks came for the body to wash and bury it, and obviously discovered that Marino was actually a woman, but had never said a word in her defense all through the years.
So they made her a saint, as a sort of a belated apology, I guess.
At that point, an elderly Lebanese-American with a very dignified expression and *very* impressive gut decided the going was too rough for him, and left the group with his wife and son; the rest of us continued a bit down the valley. Very pretty; also very easy walking since we were mostly just following a modern-day qanat – a concrete aqueduct running along the side of the gorge. Our guide pointed out a cave where an actual modern-day hermit has been living for the last eight years; he's Colombian – I would expect of Lebanese ancestry; otherwise why on Earth would a Colombian decide to come here to be a hermit? We left him alone with his contemplation, though, although I did find three heads sporting baseball caps poking over a rock wall in a photo I took of it, so perhaps he's not completely lonely.
After a picnic by the ruins of a house on the hillside we ended up in a small extremely Christian hamlet; some people bought yogurt, labneh, and eggs. Beautiful day for it – warm, but not hot, clear skies, a pleasant wind from the sea. The perfect spring day, really.
Liban-Trek seems to have more and more customers every time we visit. The first time there were maybe a half-dozen of us; now there were two times twenty. The guide mentioned that hiking is becoming more popular. I'd noticed that the environment figures rather prominently in most programs the parties are preparing for the June elections; perhaps some kind of awareness is dawning here too. Even so, there was a quite a bit of trash left by the trail, and the hamlet appears to dump all of its trash in a brook just below.
...
Today marked the anniversary of the start of the civil war. On April 13, 1975, some Kataeb militiamen attacked a bus full of Palestinian civilians in Ain el-Remmaneh (that's where, incidentally, Dahlia & co. live, and which still sports plenty of shrapnel and bullet holes in the walls, and some completely shot-up buildings). Apparently some drug dealers from the Ja'afari clan in Beka'a decided that it would be a good day for payback.
One of their sheikhs, a notorious drug baron, had been killed by the army a couple of weeks ago, when he attempted to force a checkpoint in a stolen car. (He had 172 arrest warrants on him, too.) The Ja'afaris had apparently agreed to a reconciliation barbecue with the Army, but some of them jumped the gun: they laid an ambush for an army patrol and RPG'ed one of their vehicles. Four killed, one wounded, and celebratory fire heard from the Ja'afari part of town in Beka'a. Some 86 French tourists were in the vicinity, and were evacuated to the home of the Minister of Tourism in nearby Zahle, who personally apologized to the lot of them. Everybody, including the Ja'afari clan, condemned the attack, and the pictures of the martyrs are on TV all the time. I thought something was up, when we ran into the army checkpoint across the motorway – they haven't had those since the Syrians left. Our neighbor Therese's mother was at her second home overlooking the valley, and seems she heard the firefight loud and clear.
I really wish everybody would just calm the fuck down. And that applies to the whole damn region.
