21 July 2008

BSOUS: Tucked away on a winding road, Lebanon's silk museum resides in the sleepy town of Bsous, near Wadi Chahrour. The Bsous Silk Museum is housed in a beautifully restored former silk factory. As Donna Raad, a tour guide at the silk museum, explained, it "was built by the Fayad family and fully operational between 1901 and 1954."

The factory became defunct following the regional decline of silk production and was later occupied by Syrian troops during Lebanon's bloody 1975-1990 Civil War.

The Bsous museum is the only one of its kind in Lebanon. That may seem a little strange when, as the signs in the museum will tell you, silk production was at one period the pillar of the Lebanese economy, counting for 62 percent of all exports between 1872 and 1910.

Lebanon 's first silk factory was established in 1840 in Btater, Mount Lebanon - in those days the mountain was an autonomous district within the Ottoman Empire.

In 1914, it is estimated that there were roughly 120,000 textile workers in "Syria and Lebanon." Most of them worked in the silk industry. In that golden period, a "Silk Office" was set up to manage the region's silk industry.

According to a 1968 study available at the museum by American University of Beirut professor Ilmir Maurice Shihab, "there were 194 Lebanese-owned silk factories in 1893" and "by 1911 Lebanon and Syria were producing around 524,000 kilos of raw silk, most of which was for export to Lyon, France."

Numerous factors led to the decline of Lebanon's silk industry. According to Shihab, factories suffered from a major shortage of women - who long dominated the silk factories' workforce - after they found they earned more in lacework, which they could do from home.

He also noted that when silk factories shifted from all-female to mixed workspaces, angry reactions from Mount Lebanon's religious authorities - two patriarchs named Aoun and Geagea, as it happens - deterred many families from sending women to work. The availability of cheaper cloth like rayon and cotton, as well as increased competition from other silk producing countries, spelt the end of Lebanon's remaining factories.

Donna Raad says Lebanon's silk enterprise was over by 1982 - defeated by cheap mass production from China, which still dominates the industry today. "That year, the Silk Office was suspended indefinitely."

The relatively peaceful period following the Civil War saw a surge in socio-cultural heritage activity around the country, all with the aim of preserving sites of historical importance.

In the southern coastal town of Sidon, for example, the Audi Foundation transformed a soap factory into a museum and the Hariri Foundation renovated the Khan al-Franj, built in the seventeenth century by Emir Fakhreddin. A $5 million donation from The National Heritage Foundation allowed for the restoration of Beirut 's National Museum, which suffered great damage and flooding during the Civil War.

The Memory and Development Association (AMED), another association dedicated to renovating buildings of historic value, was responsible for restoring the Bsous factory. It opened to the public in 1999, advertising itself as an eco-museum where communities, land and cultural heritage come together to relate the collective memory of Lebanon's silk production.

According to Raad, Lebanon's numerous other silk factories have either been transformed into grand, traditional style houses, or else abandoned. "The owners [Georges Assily and his wife] agreed to restore the factory into a museum because they used to work in the textile industry and in order to contribute to Lebanese culture. They wanted to keep the memory of Lebanon's silk production, the history of the factory and its heritage alive."

The Silk Museum sits grandly in the midst of a large, lush garden dotted with mulberry trees. The trees' leaves are the staple diet of silkworms and were once a familiar sight across Mount Lebanon.

An excerpt of Frenchman Victor Guerin's 1881 book "Mission au Liban: extraits de la Terre Sainte," hangs on a wall of the museum and informs passers by that "In the early 20th century, there were 3,160,000 mulberry trees in Lebanon ... it is undoubtedly the most precious tree in the country."

Raad explained that the garden was planted to encourage agricultural tourism and the museum's brochure states it "is also a gentle reminder of the interaction between humans, insects and plants and the rewards that this brought to Lebanon for hundreds of years."

In addition to more exotic scented plants, the garden also has 12 different kinds of Lebanese plants. On Friday afternoons, children are invited to learn about how to care for plants and their various uses.

© Copyright The Daily Star 2008.

 

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