Beirut’s Museums of war and memories

The New Yorker

For fifteen years, the National Museum of Beirut was one of the most dangerous places in the world’s most violent city. It was in the middle of the deadly Green Line, which divided more than a dozen warring militias. It marked one of only five crossing points between the Muslim west and the Christian east. When I lived in Beirut, in the nineteen-eighties, I used to dash like mad along the museum crossing during occasional ceasefires to get supplies in the east, then hope that the ceasefire would last long enough for me to race back to the west. Snipers were positioned inside and around the building to pick off people even when guns were supposed to be silent.

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