My first stop in Tripoli (طرابلس) was this old fort, built in the 13th century. It has been built and rebuilt through the centuries, the last addition made in the 19th century.
Our weekend tour was clearly planned out, but none of us (the fifty students who the trip was planned for) had any idea where exactly we were going to be stopping and when. After visiting the most famous sweet shop in Lebanon, Abdul Rahman Hallab, we headed to the old citadel.
My first thoughts are the citadel were (in order) 'god, it's hot', 'wow, this is huge', and 'why are there tanks and soldiers in here?'. The entire country of Lebanon is a mixture of historical eras, and there were moments this weekend where I could have gone back in time and absolutely nothing would have been different.
Enough of me, but in case you haven't heard enough about the citadel, here you go. And most importantly, here are some pictures.
The holes they used to pour boiling oil through onto invaders only have sunshine passing through these days:
The citadel was huge, I could not take a picture of the whole building from the outside, this is a general idea of what the inside was like:
The fort's renovators each brought their own architectural styles to the building, but few of the details remain today. One of my favorite pictures of the day, some detail that remained:
It was never said outright on my tour, but as you know by now the history of Lebanon is not without frequent turmoil and unrest, also known as periods when the government's last priority is protecting its monuments. This next photo is a close up of the carvings on a sarcophagus in the fort, the border you see around them was an attempt to remove them but was obviously disrupted. The faces are supposed to represent the family of the person buried in the sarcophagus:
The army is all over the place in Lebanon, but the one place I have been most surprised to see them was inside the citadel of Tripoli. As I wrote previously, there is a very recent history of unrest in Tripoli, and one suspects their strong presence is a direct result of that. Here you can see a mix of tape blocking off an archeological site and an army post inside the citadel:
There were also several tanks and other vehicles parked outside of the citadel, but I won't post a picture of those because you're really not supposed to take them in the first place.
My last photo doesn't look like much, and it's not really, just the stone circles where horses were tied up. I love the circles because they were so obviously hand carved in a time before metal was widely available and you can see that someone worked hard to make them.
That's all from my time in Tripoli, I will write about my time in the Cedars tomorrow and finish up my account of the weekend the day after that.
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