22 August 2006

TERBOL, Lebanon: Terbol is a remote, unusually dry and stultifyingly dull village in the Bekaa Valley. Were it not for the establishment of an innovative museum there, situated amid an otherwise gray and spiritless landscape, Terbol would boast few attractions for visitors, particularly during the hot summer months. The local inhabitants of Terbol are predominantly Christian farmers, entrenched in their community yet keen to maintain good relations with their Muslim neighbors in nearby villages, many of whom suffered brutal and repeated strikes by the Israeli Air Force during the latest war in Lebanon.

Terbol, like many other villages across the country, opened its arms during the fighting to give refuge to displaced people from targeted areas.

In times of peace, there is nothing particularly striking about the town of Terbol and yet, at the same time, it is the perfect place for an ecological museum that exhibits archaic agricultural tools alongside contemporary photographs by local and international artists. Earlier this summer, for example, Houda Kassatly and Franck Christen (a French artist who is known for his fashion photography and still lifes) held a joint exhibition at the Terbol Museum.

When the war began in mid-July, much of the Bekaa was cut off from the rest of Lebanon. Jean Jabbour, a farmer who looks after the grounds of the museum, and his niece Rita, who in better times welcomes visitors and guides them through the exhibitions, decided to stay in the museum throughout the violence. Both endured the war unscathed, and the museum escaped without damage.

The Terbol Museum owes its existence, however, to an earlier and less dramatic survival story - a simple mud-brick farmhouse in the village center withstood the tests of time and eventually attracted the attention of Lebanon's National Heritage Foundation, which decided to refurbish it and create a museum on the site.

Terbol opened its doors two summers ago, primarily for the sake of preserving an icon of rural vernacular architecture, but also to keep the remnants of a traditional way of life from disappearing altogether.

"It is about creating links between what we are and what we used to be, who we are and who we used to be," explains Jean-Marc Bonfils, an award-winning architect who worked on the rehabilitation of the original building. He was one of 10 volunteers who brought the project to fruition.

"[We are] trying to create links with real issues, cultural and social, trying to create links with your roots and my roots. To do that we needed some kind of an icon," he explains. "Terbol was that icon."

Describing himself as Lebanese first and French second, Bonfils adds: "I believe in preserving my roots and heritage. It is something in which and through which you have to live. Nostalgia is a very powerful tool, and if used with an optimistic approach, it becomes something productive. I want to know what existed here before me because I need to be clear with myself," he says.

The museum shifted from concept to reality thanks to a book by Kassatly called "Terres de Bekaa" ("Lands of the Bekaa"). Kassatly is an anthropologist and ethnologist as well as a photographer. "Terres de Bekaa" portrays houses and traditional dwellings throughout the Bekaa. It was published by the National Heritage Foundation and Nayla Kettaneh Kunigk, a Lebanese art dealer with a commercial gallery in Munich, Galerie Tanit.

"We started looking for a mud house, and this one was the biggest mud house we could find," explains Bonfils. "We were looking for something special and we wanted to rescue it. It is one of the oldest and biggest houses."

Kunigk recalls the story of a similar museum at Ibl al-Saqieh, on the Lebanese-Israeli border, which was entirely destroyed during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

"Since then, no other museum in Lebanon has been dedicated to bringing the heritage of the Lebanese countryside back to life," Kunigk says.

Bonfils says Terbol presented a real challenge for him. "How can an architect not to be an architect and redo a mud house? I did not know the technique. I had to research a lot, put all the themes together and redo it. And it was not so easy to find people in the Bekaa Valley who know or still remember how to build a mud house."

The house now stretches over 150 square meters and cost around $50,000 to be restored, an effort that lasted from the summer of 2003 until July 2004.

Bonfils says that in some instances he had to amend certain techniques using modern architectural means, especially to save the roof, which was halfway collapsed, and to add two additional rooms.

"A mud house is an eternal renewal," Bonfils says.