Ghost Houses

A crack in the wall

While in the mountains, we ran into lots of ‘ghost houses’. I’ve written about them before; they were the summer residences of people living in Beirut, and when the civil war moved to the mountains, these houses were abandoned, and subsequently targeted, emptied of their contents by looters (read local militias, Syrians, and anyone trying to make a buck), shot to pieces, and neglected.



Nothing left standing but the walls



Because the war lasted quite a bit longer than most people anticipated, the original owners often died, and the property was inherited by their children or other family members. And now these – often monumental – villas are owned by several people who are usually not on the same wave length when it comes to restoring. One wants to restore, the other cannot spent that kind of money on a secondary house. One wants to sell, another doesn’t, and as a result, they just stand there, year after the year.



The mountains above Beirut are teeming with buildings like this

In the past, I’ve seen plenty of places that we were interested in buying, but when we would go around and locate the owners, there were sometimes more than 7 different people you had to convince, and there’s always one that really isn’t interested, and doesn’t need the money, and that’s where the deal stops.



I found a beautiful tile floor



When you see these places, it is clear that at one point in time, Lebanon must have been a very rich nation. I wonder what will happen to these houses. All over the mountains, they are building new residences. Beirut itself is one huge building pit, cranes popping up left and right. Yet very few of these old houses are being restored.

Left-over belongings of an era gone by

It’s a pity, because many are architectural masterpieces. Okay, that may be a little overrated. But they do exhale the ‘old’ Lebanon.