Gemmayzeh & Mar Mikhael

As you climb, notice how the city works. Washing hangs between balconies. A cat sits on a ledge watching you with professional indifference. Somewhere above, a generator starts up — Lebanon has been running on private generators for years because the national electricity grid, like so much of the state infrastructure, has largely collapsed under the weight of debt, corruption, and economic mismanagement that has brought the country to its knees since 2019. The crisis that began that year wiped out the savings of an entire generation. The Lebanese pound lost more than ninety percent of its value. What you see in these streets is people who stayed and found a way.

Take your time on these steps. The city opens up as you climb — rooftops, satellite dishes, the flicker of the Mediterranean somewhere in the haze. This is how Beirut reveals itself: not all at once, but incrementally, step by step, detail by detail, the beautiful and the broken inseparable from each other.

At the top of the steps, turn right onto Rue Gouraud. That long, straight street stretching ahead of you is the spine of Gemmayzeh, and it is where this walk begins in earnest.

What you'll notice first is how the street functions now. The ground floors are bars, cafes, restaurants, boutiques — some of the best nightlife and food in the Arab world happens on this block. Gemmayzeh became Beirut's entertainment district in the years following the end of the civil war in 1990, when the city went through an extraordinary period of reconstruction and optimism. Young Lebanese who had grown up with the war found ways to build something beautiful out of the rubble, and they built a lot of it here. The neighbourhood developed a reputation for being sophisticated, cosmopolitan, a place where the different sectarian communities that so often define Lebanese life could sit at the same table.

Then came the explosion.

On the fourth of August 2020, two thousand seven hundred and fifty tonnes of ammonium nitrate that had been stored illegally in a warehouse at the Beirut port detonated in one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in human history. The blast killed two hundred and eighteen people, injured more than six thousand, and left three hundred thousand homeless. The shockwave shattered every window on Rue Gouraud. It collapsed ceilings, blew in doors, stripped the facades of buildings that had survived fifteen years of civil war. The neighbourhood that had rebuilt itself once was suddenly in ruins again.

Look at the buildings around you. You will see both: the restored facades, gleaming and proud, and the ones that still show the blast damage — cracked cornices, missing balcony railings, windows bricked over because the glass hasn't been replaced. The street is alive. The bars are full. People are here. But Rue Gouraud carries its history visibly, in the surface of every building.

The 2020 port explosion was catastrophic for the Sursock. The blast blew out the building's famous stained glass windows — some of them over a century old. It destroyed parts of the roof, cracked the ornate interior stonework, and damaged artworks in the collection. The museum, which had only recently completed a major expansion and renovation, was suddenly a ruin again.

What followed was remarkable. A global fundraising effort, contributions from Lebanese diaspora communities, international cultural foundations, and individual donors raised millions for restoration. The effort is ongoing. The museum is in the process of being painstakingly restored, window by window, arch by arch, using traditional craftspeople and historic records to return the building as close as possible to what it was.

Stand at the gates and look at the building. You are looking at an act of collective determination — the decision of a community to restore not just a physical structure but the idea that Beirut is a place of culture and beauty and permanence, even when everything seems to argue otherwise. Whether the museum is open during your visit depends on where the restoration stands, but the building itself, visible from the street, is worth the climb.

The Sursock family was part of the small, extraordinarily influential Greek Orthodox merchant aristocracy that shaped Beirut's commercial and cultural life from the eighteenth century onward. They were cosmopolitan in the fullest sense of the word: at home in Paris, London, Alexandria, and Constantinople as much as in Beirut. The palace was the centre of Beirut's social life for decades — a place where politicians, artists, intellectuals, and the city's various community leaders came together in a city that was, before everything fell apart, genuinely cosmopolitan.

The palace was also severely damaged in the 2020 explosion. Like the museum, it is in restoration. The family has remained committed to Beirut in a way that not all wealthy Lebanese have been — the economic crisis has driven much of the capital out of the country, taking an estimated two billion dollars a month with it as people moved their money and often themselves abroad. The families who stayed, who continue to invest in these buildings and this neighbourhood, are making a statement as political as it is architectural.

Look at the garden walls. The bougainvillea that grows over the blast-damaged stonework has become, in photographs taken since 2020, one of the defining images of Beirut's resilience — the extravagant pink and orange flowers cascading over ruins, indifferent to catastrophe, insisting on beauty anyway.

Stand in front of the church for a moment and think about what it means. The people who built this church arrived here with almost nothing. They had walked out of massacres, across deserts, through years of displacement and statelessness. They rebuilt their lives in Beirut, building churches and schools and community organisations with the specific intention of preserving an identity that someone had tried to destroy. The Armenian community in Beirut has been doing that for over a hundred years, and the church is the physical centre of that effort.

Inside, if it is open, you will find the particular aesthetic of Armenian Orthodox Christianity: the deep red and gold of the iconostasis, the khachkars — the intricate stone crosses that are one of the great achievements of Armenian visual culture — and the sense of a community that has made beauty into a form of resistance. The liturgy is sung in Classical Armenian, a language that is itself a form of preservation.

Mar Mikhael takes its name from this Armenian community's devotion to the Archangel Michael. The neighbourhood that surrounds you — the bars, the workshops, the small factories, the street art — has been built on the foundation that the Armenian refugees laid when they arrived here more than a hundred years ago.

You will hear this described, sometimes critically, as the madness of the Lebanese — the capacity to party in the middle of catastrophe. But spend any time here and you understand it differently. The bars and restaurants of Mar Mikhael are not escapism. They are an economic ecosystem that provides livelihoods, a social fabric that holds communities together, and a declaration that the city is still here, still alive, still worth showing up for. The international recognition that followed — Beirut making every list of the world's best bar cities, sommeliers and cocktail writers flying in despite everything — has been both a lifeline and a form of solidarity.

Look at the buildings around you on Rue Armenia. You will see the pre-explosion renovation work that many of the building owners had done — the careful restoration of Ottoman-era facades, the repurposing of old workshops and warehouses into creative spaces. And you will see the damage that was undone that. Some buildings have been restored again. Some have not. The neighbourhood is operating in a state of permanent incompletion, and it has decided to be beautiful anyway.

Find a table if you can. Order a Lebanese wine — the Bekaa Valley produces some of the best wine in the Middle East, and it is worth knowing this. Sit with the paradox for a moment before we continue.

Two hundred and eighteen people were killed in those seconds. More than six thousand were injured. Three hundred thousand were made homeless overnight. Almost all of Gemmayzeh and Mar Mikhael sustained major damage. The port, the city's economic artery, was destroyed.

The ammonium nitrate had arrived in Beirut in 2013 aboard a Moldovan-flagged cargo ship called the MV Rhosus, which had been abandoned by its owner after being impounded at the port for safety violations. The Lebanese customs authority had sent multiple letters to the judiciary requesting instructions for what to do with the two thousand seven hundred and fifty tonnes of highly explosive fertiliser. The letters were ignored. Multiple Lebanese officials at multiple levels of government knew the material was there. Nobody acted. This is not a story of an accident. It is a story of institutional negligence, corruption, and a state so dysfunctional it could not act on knowledge of an existential threat sitting in its own harbour.

No one has been held accountable. The lead investigator, Judge Tarek Bitar, has been repeatedly suspended and obstructed by a political class that fears what a genuine investigation might reveal. The families of the dead continue to demand justice in a country whose government has consistently prioritised its own protection over their grief.

From here you can see the port silos — the enormous grain storage structures that are still standing, still visibly damaged, still debated. Some want them demolished. Others want them preserved as a memorial, a ruin that cannot be erased. The argument is not settled.

The garden sits in the Achrafieh district, the predominantly Christian neighbourhood that has been one of Beirut's most culturally significant areas since the Ottoman period. Achrafieh means 'the noble' or 'the elevated' in Arabic, and the name reflects both the physical reality — the neighbourhood climbs the eastern hills above the city — and the social reality, since it has long been associated with the Beirut establishment, the educated professional classes, the cultural institutions.

Sit here for a moment and notice what the city sounds like from above. The traffic, always the traffic — Beirut's chronic congestion, made worse by the collapse of public transport and the fuel shortages that have plagued the country since 2019 when the economic crisis began. The generators. The call to prayer from the mosque in the valley below and, if the timing is right, the church bells from one of the Maronite or Greek Orthodox churches on the hill above. This sonic layering — the different religious communities' calls marking time simultaneously — is quintessentially Lebanese, and in Sioufi Garden you can hear the whole city at once.

The garden is also a marker of what Beirut was before and what it is trying to remain: a city where people of different backgrounds share public space, sit in the same park, exist alongside each other in the ordinary way. After everything this neighbourhood has been through, that ordinariness is not ordinary at all.

The civil war killed approximately one hundred and fifty thousand people and displaced nearly a million others in a country that at the time had a population of roughly three million. It ended in 1990 with the Taif Agreement, brokered in Saudi Arabia, which adjusted the confessional power-sharing arrangements that had governed Lebanon since independence and remains the constitutional basis of the state today. The war ended but the system that produced it remained, and the political crises that have punctuated the decades since — assassinations, the 2006 war with Israel, the 2019 popular uprising, the 2020 explosion — have all operated within that same unresolved framework.

Walking through Achrafieh today you see the reconstruction work of thirty-five years alongside the new damage of four years ago. A building restored after the civil war, then damaged again by the explosion, now being restored again. Beirut has been rebuilding itself repeatedly for half a century. The people who do that work — the architects, the craftspeople, the homeowners who spend money they cannot easily spare on fixing facades that have been broken twice — are making a statement about the future that is more powerful than any political speech.

This neighbourhood, with its churches and its restaurants and its boutiques and its scars, is the argument for Beirut's continued existence. It is not a comfortable argument. It is an honest one.

The silos are visible from here. Those enormous concrete cylinders, still standing despite the explosion that hollowed out the rest of the port infrastructure, have become the most debated structures in Lebanon. They absorbed part of the blast, and some engineers believe they prevented even greater destruction to the city behind them. They are damaged, structurally compromised, partially collapsed. They were built in the 1960s and held the grain reserves that fed Lebanon. After the explosion, there was no grain left.

Look at the blast zone from this distance and let the scale register. The destruction you can see — the cleared ground, the still-absent buildings, the port infrastructure that remains partially inoperable years later — represents not just physical damage but the destruction of livelihoods, of a neighbourhood that had been one of the most vibrant in Beirut, of the psychological security of an entire city that had believed the worst was behind it.

And yet. Look back at the street you have walked today. Rue Gouraud with its bars and its bouganvillea. The Sursock Museum being painstakingly rebuilt. The Armenian church still standing. The steps you climbed this morning, still carrying people up and down the hill. Sioufi Garden, still full. Mar Mikhael, still open for business.

Beirut has been destroyed and rebuilt so many times that resilience is not a metaphor here. It is a technology, passed down through generations, encoded into the way people build and live and choose to stay. The city you have walked today is evidence of that technology at work. It is imperfect. It is incomplete. It is, against considerable odds, still here.

The Mediterranean light at this hour turns the stone facades to gold. That is not a consolation. But it is true.