![]() Most Lebanese empathize with Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, but not enough to bring the battle here. Christian areas are believed to be safer than places with large Shiite populations, although Israel bombed them, too, in its war against Hezbollah in 2006. Ehden’s gracious stone villas seem far from Israelis and Hezbollah alike. The Lebanese invariably assume that the embassies know more than they do, which explains why some families have booked houses and apartments up here, forty miles north of Beirut and more than seventy from the border. Most of the embassies in Beirut have advised their nationals to leave the country-less in the conviction that a Lebanon–Israel war is inevitable, it seems, than to reduce the number of citizens who would need to evacuate if the worst happens. Was it Israeli bombardment or mere thunder? It was thunder, but many friends asked themselves the same question before going back to sleep. What we’re doing in Gaza, we can also do in Beirut.” One night before I left Beirut for Ehden I was awakened by a devastating bang. On November 11 Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, reportedly warned that in the event of war with Hezbollah, “the ones who will pay the price will be first and foremost Lebanese citizens…. Fear that the Gaza onslaught could extend to Lebanon is widespread. If Hezbollah’s skirmishes along the border with Israel flare into a full-scale conflagration, the winter calm in Ehden will end. Like Khaled, who died this past September, I weep over the tragedies imposed on the region since the start of the last century, from Turkey to Gaza. I’m reading my friend Khaled Khalifa’s last novel, No One Prayed Over Their Graves, which features an engaging cast of Muslims, Christians, Jews, and atheists during the waning decades of Ottoman rule in Syria. I feel at home in Ehden, drinking homemade arak and eating kibbeh nayeh-ground lamb tartar with bulgur made better here than anywhere else. Winter has come, and I have the place mostly to myself. The season ends on the Day of the Raising of the Cross in mid-September. You cannot get a table at that time of year. At the center of Ehden lies a modest piazza called the Midan, whose cafés, restaurants, and hotels surround a flagstone quadrangle not much bigger than two basketball courts. There is even a kind of respect for Zgharta’s mountain stubbornness.Įhden comes alive in the summer, when the inhabitants of Zgharta move to their houses here. Zgharta’s men descended on Tripoli with their light arms, surrounded the jail, and forced the cops to release him. In the early 1970s police arrested a local and jailed him in the regional capital, Tripoli. Zgharta-Ehden too was a village of churches, clan rivalries, and overflowing cemeteries. The closest equivalent I ever found was the mountain village of Corleone in Sicily-immortalized by Mario Puzo in The Godfather-where women in black scurried silently in and out of the churches while men in flat caps stood outside bars with their hands in their pockets. Almost every woman in the village dressed in black as an emblem of mourning for the husband, son, brother, or father lost in one or another of the vendettas that plagued their lives. The truncated entrance had been built to stop Ottoman cavalry from riding into and desecrating the sanctuary. The first time I visited the ancestral seat, fifty years ago, I had to crouch to get through the doorway of Our Lady of Zgharta Maronite Church. Her Arabic-like her cooking-marked her as a born-and-bred Zghartawi. Although her mother married again and took her to the New World, she never lost touch with her native land. Other relatives told me he died in a feud among the families. In one, her father is killed defending the village from an Ottoman raid about 1890, a few months before she was born. My Makary grandmother raised me on mountain folktales. ![]() The Frangiehs have been primus inter pares since one of them, Suleiman Frangieh, became president of Lebanon in 1970. Five families-Frangieh, Moawad, Doueihy, Karam, and Makary-have vied for dominance over the centuries. Most Lebanese, including urban Maronites, regard them as hillbillies whose feuds would embarrass the Hatfields and McCoys. Even today their Arabic is pronounced with a distinctive Aramaic accent. The people of Ehden and Zgharta, its sister village in the foothills nearer the sea, spoke Aramaic into the nineteenth century. Some Maronites like to claim descent from the Phoenicians, although their fourth-century founder, Saint Maroun, was born in northern Syria and never set foot in Lebanon. Perched above the Qadisha (Sacred) Valley, it has long been a redoubt of the Maronite sect, an Eastern rite of Roman Catholicism whose adherents built their first church, Saint Mamas, here in 749 AD. Ehden is an ancient village on the northern heights of Mount Lebanon.
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