Baalbek

In the autumn of 1964 my wife, Ruth Johnson Foley, and I made a brief visit to Baalbeck. Baalbek is a town in northeastern Lebanon, not far from Damascus, the capital of Syria. Ou tour was a part of a two-week cruise in the Eastern Mediterranean aboard the Greek owned ship S.S.Mt.Acropolis. This 17,000 ton ship was built in 1939 in Camden, NJ, for the Grace Lines and chirstened Santa Clara, and sailed from the U.S. east coast through the Panama Canal ro the Pacific coast of South America. Our cruise included about 125 passengers, mostly Europeans. The ship stayed at Beirut for a full day, during which we were able to visit Baalbek and Damascus. I do not know how many of the passengers took this shore excursion, since we traveled in taxis, rather that in buses.

(click on an image for a larger version)

In 1964 Beirut was a lovely city, the "Paris of the East"

The road to Baalbek and Damascus climbs through rugged mountains

Main Street of Baalbek

During the first to third centuries of the common era the Romans built an enormous complex of temples in Baalbek. It was called Heliopolis at that time. A search of the Internet showed an unusual scarcity of photographs of these ruins, so I have scanned my Kodachrome slides and present them here. Baalbek was the subject of extensive reconstruction, largely funded by Rockefellers. It has been inaccessible to tourists during the past thirty or more years because it is a center for the Hezbollah militia. who occupy a large part of Lebanon and conduct a guerilla war against Israel.

Entrance to the Temples

Pieces of ruins have been sorted for possible reconstruction

A Christian Church

Remains of much older structures underly the Roman ones.

My wife and an English friend

Remains of the Temple of Jupiter
These monolithic columns, some around 30 meters long, came from Aswan in Egypt.

After visits to Eqypt, I can conceive of the columns being floated down the Nile and across the Mediterranean, but carrying them across the mountains of Lebanon to Baalbek is an amazing feat.

These beautiful ceilings may have explained the Roman preference for couches.

[Click to enlarge]

Gerard M Foley

Gerry Foley