Byblos recovery

BYBLOS, the ancient Canaanite port, has made a nice recovery in the last few years. The NYT reports:

If Beirut is the Paris of the Middle East, as the cliché goes, then Byblos, some 22 miles up the coastline, is its Cannes: an ancient port framed by pre-Roman ruins, white sandy beaches and cedar-topped mountains. The city is famous for its fish restaurants, which serve up fresh red snapper and sea bass to an international clientele. Party yachts cruise into its spectacular harbor at sundown, the way Brando and Sinatra did during Byblos’s prewar heyday, docking next to old dinghies and wooden fishing boats with names like “Taxi Joe.” Arab starlets and their hangers-on shimmy all day at nearby beach resorts like Eddé Sands, studded with palm trees, shimmering pools and Lebanese glitterati.

The city’s revived night life is adding a new dimension to the already powerful lure of its 7,000-year-old history and ruins. For years, Byblos’s main draws were its Crusader citadel, Phoenician ramparts and Bronze Age ruins of L-shaped temples scattered along a seaside bluff like oversized Lego blocks. Byblos lays claim to being one of the oldest continuously inhabited towns in the world, dating its origins to 5000 B.C., as well as the birthplace of the modern alphabet (“byblos” is the Greek word for papyrus).

It was a major commercial port for ancient Egyptian seafarers buying cedar. Though many of its best-preserved sarcophagi and hieroglyphic vases are now in Beirut’s National Museum, visitors can wander through the endless maze of ruins and marvel at one of the world’s earliest examples of sophisticated urban planning.

“I come to just walk around and soak up the atmosphere,” said Mouna Bassili Sehnaoui, a painter from Beirut with a shock of silvery hair. “The stones almost seem to want to talk about what happened here many millennia ago.”

Background here.