Baalbek

Don't tell anyone, but I've been teaching about Baalbek for years without ever going there. So I was very happy when Stephen Bourke said he is good friends with Bettina Fischer-Genz of the DAI, who lives in Beirut, and who was going with her team to Baalbek. We made contact and it turned out that the week I was planning to visit Pierre-Marie was also the best week to visit the Germans in Baalbek. Huzza! So, a quick overnight at the Hotel Sultan (no furniture bought since 1956, and the carpet is cheap nylon carpet squares, but it is clean and relatively cheap - $US40 per night for a single lady, incl tax and breakfast, easy to find, and staffed by extremely helpful guys), and off early in the morning to get a taxi collectif to Baalbek.
Actually, a taxi to, well, really I don't know. I was pounced on at the Samariyeh bus station again, so there was the standard scene of me trying to grab my bag back off of some toothless geezer who was attempting to put it into the boot of a car before I'd even discussed prices (less, as it turned out, than Zachariya of Bosra, or the Hotel Sultan guys, thought it would be). The catch was, as I found out en route, that the taxi collectif was actually going to Beirut and the driver was going to off-load me in the middle of Lebanon somewhere. I attempted to connect with the Zen of travel, on the grounds of "What could possibly go wrong?", and admired the view up the gorge as we hurtled along towards the border crossing at Masnaa. I find to my Jordanian eyes, the names of villages in Syria and Lebanon a little peculiar, but let's not talk about what the Syrians and Lebanese think about Jordan, altogether!
I was also hoping that the advice on the Lebanese embassy website (Australians and New Zealanders can get free visas at the border) was true. And it was.
But my goodness, there's a big difference between the Lebanese troops on the border and the pretend fellows the Syrians and Jordanians post at their border crossings. These Lebanese chaps have about them the air of men who have spent much of their adult lives shooting to kill their fellow citizens, and it wouldn't take a whole lot more to get them started on it all over again. Just the way they wore their uniform sleeves rolled up, the state of their boots and most of all their attitude, I thought, uh oh, REAL soldiers. And they are everywhere - like in Israel, always some guy going home from or returning to barracks, asleep straight way as he sits down in the front seat (of course) of the mini van, guns at the ready.
And speaking of mini vans, let's get back to Bar Elias (I think this is the name of the town in question) where my taxi collectif (sorry - just love French, you can simply say comical English words in a pretend accent and it works!) driver kindly drove around town, zooming up on mini vans and yelling at the driver "Baalbek?". Eventually one nodded, we cut him off, and I was transferred from vehicle to van. Having no Lebanese money (never did get any) I was a little worried about paying the mini van guy, but the taxi driver assured me that $US2 would be fine. And it was, for which I got an extravagent, and speedy, tour of the lower Beqa'a as the mini van criss crossed this fertile, wide Valley and ended up at Baalbek.

Here is a view through the mediaeval walls around the main complex at Baalbek - for those of you not paying attention in class, the sacred compound was fortified in the middle Islamic period (after Justinian had the main temple dismantled to use the columns in the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, and Theodorius built a church over the altars in the courtyard, which was a radical thing to do - most temple to church conversions hedged their bets and left the altar area and the inner temple rooms alone):

















If you click on this photo you will see that the block in the front says IOMH - Iovi Optimo Maximo Heliopolitano - Jupiter the Best, the Highest of Heliopolitanus (=the name of Baalbek in the Roman period, although, obviously, that is in Greek, and further, clearly, Baal, Helios the sun god, and Jupiter/Zeus get mixed up together here).



I went mad photographing details, but was in a bit of rush, as I'd contacted Bettina as soon as I got out of the van, and Stephen is right, she is a sweetie. She explained where the team had lunch (they rent several houses out the back of Baalbek, but the main team has a floor of a hotel in town) and that gave me 1.5 hours to race around the huge complex before heading off the joing the Germans.
So, here are some photos. I found it very difficult to snap the scale of the place (Carrie Swan has a shot of herself spreadeagled against a piece of column which is on its side and, although she is tall, her arms and legs only just reach to the edges - and that is from one of the smaller columns of the Jupiter temple).

OK: this is a detail off of the temple of "Jupiter" entabulature with the main altar in the background. People climbed up the internal staircases of the altar-tower, to sacrifice on the artificial high-place




More gorgeous carving lying around

These are the remaining six columns from the main temple

And here we have the famous doorway to the temple of "Bacchus" - no idea actually which deity was worshipped here. That keystone is cemented in today, with a particularly ugly bit of so-called conservation work, but was held up until the late 19th century by dirt - giving you an idea of how much debris built up. In the 60s and 70s an architect with delusions of grandeur, Kalayan, proceeded to clear large sections of the site, in the employee of the Lebanese antiquities authorities, and re-erect quite a lot of stone work. The current workmen look back on these days with nostalgia, as they involved a lot of action, manly pulling on ropes with something to see for all the sweat afterwards. This modern poncing about slowly with trowels and ground penetrating radar is not nearly what they consider REAL archaeology.


this looks up at the curved ceiling of the colonnade around the outside of the cella of "Bacchus"

















After lunch I had archaeology fun talking about lamps and large storage jars with Bettina and her colleagues. Knock off was at 4pm, and two of the team took me into town for fruit smoothies and then to the internet cafe, somewhere in the back streets, up some urine scented stairs in a very seedy looking establishment. I think it was a ladies only internet cafe though. But then there was a bit of very Lebanese business.
After the civil war, the government supplied power throughout the land. But most of the land didn't pay for it, plus the fiefdoms which had arisen in the land during the war realised they were missing out on money. So now the central government only supplies the power it is paid for by the region, and then cuts off the supply, ie no electricity comes down the wire for, say 2 hours, and then it comes back on. The region can choose to pay more to the central government, but because it is Lebanon, lots of deals have been done with guys who privately generate electricity (do not ask me how this works, but around Baalbek there are a lot of T-Shirts displaying machine guns and the slogan "Hezbollah will always be victorious in Lebanon", so I figure it's better not to ask). So each town has a power switching schedule, and the lights etc go out in Baalbek at 6pm for about 30 seconds until somewhere (I think, bizarrely, building by building) a switch is thrown and the private power comes on. So in the internet cafe, you have to make sure you aren't in the middle of an email at 6pm. Or 8pm, 10pm or 2 am when all this happens again!

Then we went back to the hotel the use for most of the team. I couldn't photo inside as there were always people around, but each floor of this joint is like a mini house with kitchen, big bedrooms with en suites and a giant living area. Because it is a german team this living room had all the sofas pushed back, and lots of swish tables, lamps and computers all over it.
The pay off is in the morning - out on the balconey eating my cornflakes, this was the view: