Baalbek

The mound at Baalbek was settled from the Bronze Age, and the name joins Baal, the Semitic storm god, to the region — a sanctuary long before Rome arrived. The Greeks called the place Heliopolis, city of the sun, after the conquests of Alexander, and under Roman rule, from the time of Augustus onwards, it became the site of one of the greatest building projects of the empire. Work continued for more than two centuries, producing the Temple of Jupiter Heliopolitanus on a platform of colossal stone, the Temple of Bacchus, the round Temple of Venus and the courts that led to them.

The engineering is what still draws attention. Three blocks in the western retaining wall, the trilithon, weigh in the region of 800 tonnes each, and in the quarry a short distance away lie larger blocks that were cut but never moved, including the one known as the Stone of the Pregnant Woman. How they were shifted and placed remains a matter of study, and has attracted a long fringe of speculation.

Christianity, then Islam, remade the site: a basilica was built in the great court under Theodosius, and the Umayyads raised a mosque from Roman columns. The sanctuary was fortified as a citadel in the medieval centuries, damaged repeatedly by earthquakes, and excavated by German and later French and Lebanese archaeologists from 1898. UNESCO inscribed it in 1984. The modern town became a stronghold of Hezbollah after the party's founding in the 1980s, and the Bekaa has been struck repeatedly in the fighting since 2024.

Baalbek is a Shia Muslim town with a Sunni and Christian minority, and its public life reflects that: Ashura is marked with processions and gatherings, mosques and husseiniyas anchor the neighbourhoods, and religious and political banners are part of the streetscape. It is also a tribal place, where large extended families from the surrounding villages carry weight in local affairs.

Against this stands the Baalbeck International Festival, held among the temples since the mid-1950s, which has put Lebanese and international performers on a stage between the columns and made the ruins a symbol of the country as a whole. The Temple of Bacchus has appeared on Lebanese banknotes and stamps, and school trips from across the country have come here for generations.

Manners are those of the Lebanese interior: emphatic hospitality, coffee or tea offered at once and difficult to decline, formal greetings, and a slower, more conservative register than Beirut. Visitors are still a novelty in a town whose tourism has come and gone with the security situation, and are usually met with curiosity and courtesy. Agriculture, the seasons and the state of the roads are the ordinary subjects of conversation; politics is not one for outsiders to open.

Baalbek has roughly 80,000 residents and serves a wide district of farming villages that use its markets, schools and hospital. Most people live in concrete-built quarters spreading out from the old centre, and the ruins sit directly against the houses rather than apart from them.

The valley economy is agricultural — potatoes, wheat, vegetables, vineyards and orchards on irrigated land, with dairy and sheep from the drier ground towards the Anti-Lebanon. Tourism, once a significant employer, has been intermittent for decades. The region has long been among the poorest in Lebanon, with weak state presence and high emigration, and the collapse of the currency after 2019 cut incomes further; the state supplies only a few hours of electricity a day, so private generators fill the gap where households can afford them.

The rhythm is agricultural and early: markets in the morning, a long midday pause in summer heat, and evenings in family houses. Winters are cold at this altitude and life moves indoors. Since 2024 strikes on the Bekaa have displaced families from the town and its villages, and the war has shaped every plan made here.

Baalbek's own dish is sfiha baalbakieh, small open-topped pies of finely chopped lamb mixed with tomato, onion, pine nuts and pomegranate molasses, spread thin on rounds of dough and baked quickly; they are ordered by the tray and eaten hot, and bakeries in the town are known for them across Lebanon. Lahm bi ajin, a similar meat flatbread, is the everyday version.

Otherwise the table is that of the Bekaa, the country's larder. Mezze begins with hummus, moutabbal, tabbouleh, fattoush and labneh, and the valley's kibbeh nayyeh — raw lamb pounded with bulgur and spices — has a particular reputation. Grilled lamb and shish taouk follow, with the region's vegetables and its dairy: shanklish rolled in za'atar, ambaris salted in clay jars, and thick yoghurt.

Mouneh, the preserving that fills a house for winter, matters here more than on the coast: kishk of dried yoghurt and bulgur ground to powder, pickled turnips and cucumbers, dried figs and apricots, grape molasses, and olive oil pressed in the autumn. The Bekaa is also Lebanon's vineyard, supplying wineries near Zahlé and Kefraya and the arak stills of the villages, while in the town itself tea and cardamom coffee are what is drunk.