28 February 2007

BEIRUT: Lebanon's Culture Minister Tarek Mitri held a news conference Tuesday to announce progress on two cultural initiatives in Beirut - the revival of the National Library and the construction of an arts and culture center to be located in Downtown Beirut.

According to Mitri, plans to reopen Lebanon's National Library on the grounds of the Lebanese University's old law faculty, facing the Sanayeh Garden, are now entering a new phase. The existing building, which was chosen to house the library in 1999, is ready for renovation, and extra floors will be built to create 15,000 square meters of additional space, says Amal Mansour, a press attache with the Culture Ministry. The work will take two and a half years to complete. A grant from Qatar is slated to pay for the $25-million library rehabilitation.

The original National Library was established in 1921 with a donation of 20,000 printed documents and 2,000 manuscripts from Viscount Philippe de Tarrazi. It moved into the old Parliament building on Place de l'Etoile in 1937. When the library's collection of 200,000 books, records and documents was damaged in the early days of Lebanon's Civil War, the state froze its activities and put its holdings under the control of the National Archives. By the late 1990s, numerous efforts emerged to revamp the library, with funding from France and the European Union, among others.

Mitri had wanted to lay the first stone for the new arts center on March 1. But tents pitched by the political opposition in Riad al-Solh Square - where the arts center is to be built - have made that plan impossible for now, explains Mansour.

In the meantime, Mitri has called on citizens to offer suggestions for what they would like to see in the center, a $20-million project financed with a grant from Oman. As soon as the area is clear and construction begins, Mansour says, the center will take about a year and a half to build.

Though such initiatives are modest compared to the cultural projects coming down the pike in the Gulf, according to Mansour, Mitri hopes the National Library and the arts center will help make Lebanon a leading destination for culture.