Virgin of the Snows. She stands there in her little stone niche, sheltered... (Mzaar Kfardebian)
Virgin of the Snows. She stands there in her little stone niche, sheltered by slabs of stone that seem to resemble two hands meeting prayer. She is there year round, through rain, wind, sun and snow. In the spring, she is covered by the silky dust that blows in from the east and covers the country in a thin layer, a reminder that Lebanon may be green but the desert is not far away. In winter, she is rimed in ice and probably buried beneath deep drifts, for up here on the crest of Mount Sannine, it is cold even on an August night and the snow can lie well over 10 metres deep. And yet, she endures. She isn’t the first divinity to occupy these heights. The Phoenicians held high places sacred and must once have placed some kind of shrine up here, as they did on peaks all over the Levant and as they have on this mountain’s lower slopes, for it is said that Sannine is a corrupted amalgamation of the names of the two gods they believed resided here. And as the foundations of nearly all of Lebanon’s Greek and Roman temples (and not a few of its churches and mosques) attest, what was sacred to the Phoenicians almost inevitably was to Phoenicia’s conquerors. Besides, how could this elegant mountain, which hovers snowily over Beirut and the Mediterranean in the winter and which turns a rich rosé at sunset, not be sacred? After all, from the coast, the sun rises from behind it, while from its peak, the world unfurls all around. It is so arduous to reach and so far from any ancient settlement that I wonder if it wasn’t the last of Lebanon to succumb to monotheism. That perhaps long after the valleys and the coast had abandoned the Many for the One, a final flicker of paganism lived on here, high up above.
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