Witness to History. I’m not sure what it was about this scene that caught... (Beiteddine Palace)
Witness to History. I’m not sure what it was about this scene that caught my eye. The way the walls had aged, the tantalising glimpse of the mountains in the background, the lowering clouds, or the patterns the grilles cast on flagstones. It may also have been the incongruity of the uplighter, placed there for the show that would take place later that evening, or the lovingly carved detail in the middle of the spandrel. It was familiar, this delicate double arched window. I’ve seen it hundreds of times in the Levant, of course, but it also belongs to my childhood of medieval churches and crumbling castles. The pointed arch likely made it to Italy and then the rest of Europe, through the Arab kingdoms of Sicily in the 11th Century, having been borrowed by the Arabs from the Byzantine and Sassanian architecture they found in the Levantine countries they conquered in the 8th and 9th Centuries. And so ironically, these ones were a re-import of sorts as they were the work of Italian (I think Tuscan) craftsmen, labouring in the Shouf Mountains for a Lebanese prince, who had lived for many years with the Medicis and who, since his return to Lebanon had been bent on defying the will of the Ottomans and the Sublime Porte. Where the re-import succeeded, going on to replicated by the thousand, the man who effected their return did not and though his palace (and its windows) remained, Fakhereddine wasn’t around for longer to enjoy any of it. Within a few years, he was on the run and not long after, captured, bound in chains and hauled off to Istanbul, where in April, 1635, his defiance was rewarded by the Caliph, Sultan Murad IV, with death. Ironically, given the date’s association, Fakhreddine met his maker both on a 13th and on a Friday, linking him in the meta-narrative of history, to the day on which, 318 years earlier, the Templars, once so active in his country of origin, had met their own demise on the orders of another spiritual and temporal figure, Pope Clement the Fifth.
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