On the road leading from Amsheet to the villages
of Ghofreen. Hbaleen and Hsarat and turning to the
left one sees a small village now in ruins, hardly
a village, one may say, but rather a hamlet of great
beauty, now touchingly sad, empty and abandoned
for over a hundred years.
This
is Bjereen, lying at some 1,500 feet above sea level.
According to the cadastre it is attached to Ghorfeen,
The name comes from the Aramaic-Phoenician, derived
from djorn, a mortar, in which cereals and meat
were pounded. The hamlet can be reached only by
an earthen path crossing fields, the very same path
which the locals trod a hundred years ago or more.
In
1841 the social unrest and the communal tensions
between Druze and Maronites reached a peak. The
situation rapidly deteriorated during the fall,
especially October, when the Druze attacked the
population of Deir al-Qamar and Amir Bashir Shehab
II was surrounded and awaited a help that never
arrived. Christians were killed and their homes
and property plundered and set on fire. On all sides
Christian villages and churches were attacked while
the Ottoman rulers did not interfere. In January
1842 the Sublime Porte took over, replacing Amir
Shehab by an Ottoman governor. In 1860 there were
further massacres of Christians in the mountain
region and in the town of Zahleh and even in the
city of Damascus. European intervention followed
and French soldiers landed around Beirut. After
many disagreements between the French and the British
(the former protectors of the Christians and the
latter being protectors of the Druze), they set
up an independent authority in a province called
the Mutassarifate, which was established under the
rule of Armenians and Albanians. Peace returned
to the so-called Little Lebanon, allowing development
and prosperity, in particular in the village of
which we are to speak.
There
used to be in the land of dreams and of poetry a
village with only the sky and the clouds to cover
it, namely Bjerreen, a typical Lebanese hamlet on
a hillock open to the sun and the air, lying north-east
of Ghorfeen. It could be reached on foot by its
rough pathway in about twenty minutes. One passed
a plateau worked into terraces of rich brown earth
for the cultivation of cereals, lentils and tobacco.
At the entrance of the village stood a church consecrated
to Saint Elias. In front of it in the main square
is a fountain where the farmers used to fill their
large jars and which served as a daily meeting-place
for gossip. There were only some fifteen houses
and some water wells. Each house had a terrace,
under which was an abou, a cave or cellar that served
for keeping livestock and various stores. There
were olive trees planted for oil and carobs trees
for treacle called debs as well as mulberries for
the silkworms. The peasants tilled the soil with
care as they depended on it, moving only very occasionally
down to Amsheet or Byblos to barter any surplus
and to buy salt, spice, cloth or other necessities.
On Sundays the people gathered round the fountain
in front of the church to chat and see how they
could help each other in any building requirements...
As for the women, they met two or three times a
year to prepare stocks of food for the winter, the
muni.
In the Church of Saint Elias there was an altar
dedicated to the Holy Virgin and another dedicated
to Saint Joseph. There was no bell because this
was forbidden in those days by the Ottoman regime
but instead a naqous to act as a call to prayer.
The most commonly used baptismal names were variants
of Mary and Elisabeth and the names of flowers for
women and Yussef, Tanios, Elias and Hanna for men.
The central village of Ghorfeen was rather better
off, with attractive red-tiled houses and a bigger
church with a belfry thanks to emigrants who went
to the Americas at the time of the massacre of 1960
and continued to send money regularly to their relatives…
Miryana of Ghorfeen and Youssef of Bjerreen were
distant cousins and both went to the parish school.
Miryana spent seven years there and was considered
more educated than Yussef. He left school when he
was fourteen years old to help his parents on the
land. They sometimes met half-way between the hamlet
and the fields under a carib tree that had beeen
uprooted in a storm but had taken root again.
When in 1914 the First World War broke out, the
Ottoman Empire allied itself with Germany and seized
the opportunity to terminate the Mutassarif agreement,
and secretly decided to exterminate the Christians
in the mountains. It placed the bloodthirsty Jamal
Pasha as governor, who was a member of the Young
Turks triumvirate responsible for for the Armenian
genocide. On his arrival he tried to assassinate
the Maronite patriarch Elias Hwayek, who only just
managed to escape, thanks to a Muslim friend from
Tripoli who warned him in time. Jamal Pasha proceeded
to make arbitrary arrest followed ny farcical trials
and condemnations in a reign of terror. The first
victim was a pro-French Maronite priest named Joseph
Hayek of Sin al-fil close to Beirut, hanged in Damascus
in March, 1915. Gallows were set up in Beirut and
more than twenty were hanged at the site later called
Martyrs Square. Mount Lebanon was placed under Ottoman
martial law.
Worse was to follow in the form of a terrible famine
in which the Turks played an essential role. Jamal
Paha imposed a total blockade on supplies coming
in from the Beqaa and Syria. The Central Mountain,
where the main crop was mulberry fir the silk worms,
depended largely on imports for food. Further, the
Allies imposed a total blockade on the Ottoman Empire,
which covered the Lebanese coast so the inhabitants
of Mount Lebanon were squeezed in a vice. Certain
Lebanese, Syrians and Turks of all religious sects
speculated on the stocks of food to raise the prices.
But there were also acts of heroism; the Maronite
patriarch used the money of the patriarchate at
his disposition for daily distribution to those
in need, whether Christians or Muslims. To ease
the burden on the population, the rich merchant
Mikhael Tobie Zakhia of Amsheet paid the Turkish
taxes for the regions of Jbeil and Batroun. Dr.
Joachim Nakhleh, my great-grandparent and mayor
of Byblos, pawned all his property to buy wheat
to give to the poor.
As if that were not enough, there was an invasion
of loocusts from Palestine which devoured everything
in their path and transformed green pastures into
a lunar landscape. Epidemics followed typhus, cholera,
smallpox and malaria, further cutting down the population.
Corpses littered the streets and skeletal individuals
threw themselves on their knees to beg a crust of
bread. A hundred thousand are said to have died.
As many, including the Eddes and the Gemayels, tried
to get to Syria or Egypt. Of the four-hundred-and-fifty
thousand inhabitants of Mount Lebanon there remained
only two-hundred-and-fifty thousand at the end of
the war. The Turks surrounded the land, bleeding
the population white with exorbitant taxes, imposing
forced labor, and taking young men into the army,
deporting them, or putting them to death.
On a Sunday morning in the autumn of 1916, the people
of the central village of Ghorfeen, found that the
hamlet of Bjerreen was strangely silent and some
young men sent there found it completely empty,
with not a soul around. The doors of the houses
were shut, but not those of the stables. The few
animals alive wandered through the village looking
for something to eat. There were no answers to repeated
calls and shouts.
Within a few days all the people in the surrounding
villages had learned about the disappearance of
the inhabitants of the hamlet. Together they decided
to send a guard in turn to look after the empty
place with its trees and remaining animals. It soon
became clear that all the inhabitants had left.
A messenger was sent to Amsheet but brought back
no news. Some fishermen of Byblos-Jbeil had spoken
with some acquaintances from Bjerreen some two weeks
earlier.
After the invasion of the Ottoman soldiers, and
their demands and the ensuing poverty, and after
a prayer in front of the church, the people of Bjerreen
had decided once and for all to leave the country.
The distant cousins from Gharfeen had already departed
at the time of the nineteenth-century massacres
and had managed well enough. So the people of Bjerreen
would do likewise. They would find work and at least
be free men; they could send back money and some
individuals might even return to the village. But
the departure would have to be in the greatest secret
without drawing the attention of the Ottomans.
At dawn the fishermen 0f Byblos embarked the entire
village with the bare necessities on a boat which
left in fine weather on a calm sea.
After a few more years under the Ottoman yoke the
village priests spread the news that the Allies
were approaching, first in North Africa and then
through Palestine, and would soon bring freedom.
Finally in September 1918 the British came in from
Palestine and the French landed in Beirut. The war
was over and there was a major international effort
to supply food and medicine, ending famine and epidemics.
However there was still no news from the emigrants
of Bjerreen, no letters. Miryana waited impatiently,
remembering the last meeting with her lover under
the carib tree, which haunted her dreams. Letters
were sent to “cousins” in America but brought no
snswer. After further investigation a telegram came
from the British War Office explained; because of
the blockade imposed by the Allies, the ship carrying
the people of Bjerreen had been sunk by a destroyer
by mistake, with all aboard.
Now just over a hundred years later we can walk
along the path to Bjerreen, in the footprints of
those inhabitants of another age. We reach fields
now turned to dust and some wide green terraces
where poppies grow, while birds twitter all around
and the breeze whispers through the tall wheat.
The carib tree still stands there with its secrets.
The village of Bjerreen turns one’s head; one feels
as it was parachuted from heaven into a village
of tragic beauty and as if plunged into a certain
holiness. There is a paradise nestling behind poverty.
At the entrance one turns into the one small square,
where the first building is the little church with
its stairs built into its wall. There is a fountain
with a few scattered houses, most now roofless.
Weeds and random flowers have grown inside, reaching
to the windows. There us a well with a cross engraved
on its edge and a second. A little lower down there
are two larger houses with their terraces overlooking
the fields towards the horizon. Now through the
present silence the come the voices, the laughs,
the songs and the chattering of long ago.
Marina Matar
Translation from the French: Kenneth J. Mortimer
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(2020-04-03)
