BEIRUT: A DISTORTED CITY, WAR-TORN AND familiar, flickered on my grandparents’ black-and-white television during my Eighties childhood in Athens. The reels of gunmen returning fire through ruined buildings in a city resembling mine, engraved early memories. The reports referred to it with its ancient Greek name of Berytus, but my child’s imagination filed it away somewhere geographically distant, while wondering what growing up in an urban battlefield was like.
Ten years later, in the winter of 1996, I travelled to Beirut for the first time. As I walked through the raked rubble of its postwar streets, the dysfunctional “Berytus” of my childhood resurfaced. Now that I was physically there, real moments competed with recollected small-screen images; the long rows of extinguished architectural cadavers; a pretty girl in a brightly-coloured sports…
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The Critic (Digital) - 1 Issue, August/September 2024