SOURCE: NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

BY: ABBY SEWEL

In the mountains above Beirut, a stately Ottoman-era hotel came to life again last autumn after decades of abandonment.

The Grand Hotel Casino Ain Sofar–once a preferred vacation spot for the region’s stars and the site of weddings and lavish parties–was left to looters and the occupying Syrian Army during Lebanon’s civil war, which lasted from 1975 to 1990. It was finally left empty and in disrepair.

But this past fall, hundreds of Lebanese and foreign guests once again flooded the hotel—renovated but still deliberately bearing the scars of its past—this time for weeks of events that included an art exhibition, storytelling nights, and DJ sets. The hotel has once again become the site of weddings and parties.

It’s one of a handful of examples in a growing push in Lebanon toward rehabilitating threatened landmarks, many of them damaged in the war, and re-envisioning them as collective spaces.

Amid the largely privatized post-war reconstruction process, developers and politicians imagined Beirut transforming into a glittering modernist metropolis like Dubai. Many of the city’s historic French Mandate and Ottoman-era buildings were leveled and replaced by high rises.

But as the construction has picked up pace, with cranes hovering over half-finished towers in most of Beirut’s neighborhoods, so has the push to preserve the heritage sites that remain.

“It’s a matter of identity,” says Joana Hammour, one of the organizers of Save Beirut Heritage, an organization formed in 2010 that has pushed to save threatened sites and for legislation that would preserve more. In a country with 18 recognized religious sects and a complicated patchwork of political groups, Hammour says, “We need to have those spaces of collective memory, spaces of gathering, spaces of community, to live together.”

Beit Beirut is one attempt at creating such a space. The imposing yellow building, elegant despite the bullet holes riddling its exterior, occupies a prominent corner in central Beirut on the former demarcation line that separated East and West Beirut during the civil war. Formerly a family home known as the Barakat building, it became a snipers’ perch during the war.