Bourj Hammoud, from camp to capital

The camps

The Armenians who reached Lebanon in the late 1910s and 1920s were survivors of the genocide: deportees who had lived through the Syrian desert, orphans from the relief homes, and families from Cilicia who had gone home after the First World War, only to flee again when France handed the region back to Turkey. Lebanon was then under French mandate, and many were Christians arriving in a country with a large Christian population, which made it one of the few places in the region where they could put down roots.

The first homes were tent camps on Beirut's edge, at Karantina and Mar Mikhael, near the port. Families lived in tents and then in shacks of wood and tin, through winters of rain and mud, with no idea how long it would last.

Buying the marsh

East of the Beirut River the land was marshy farmland that nobody much wanted. In the 1930s, refugees who had organized themselves by hometown, in associations of people from Adana, from Sis, from Marash, pooled what they had, and with the help of French officials bought plots of it. Those plots became the town of Bourj Hammoud.

The associations named their quarters after the places they had lost, with one word in front: Նոր, nor, new. Nor Marash. Nor Adana. Nor Sis. Nor Giligia, New Cilicia. The streets took the names of rivers, mountains and cities of historic Armenia: Araks, Aragats, Yerevan. A whole geography that had been taken away was laid out again, at a smaller scale, on two and a half square kilometers of drained marsh.

Նոր Մարաշ, Նոր Ատանա, Նոր ՍիսNor Marash, Nor Adana, Nor SisNew Marash, New Adana, New Sis.

The last camp held on much longer. The Sanjak camp was built in the late 1930s for Armenians who fled the Sanjak of Alexandretta, the region around Musa Dagh and Iskenderun, when it was handed to Turkey in 1939. People were still living there generations later.

A small country

From the 1930s to the 1970s, Bourj Hammoud and Armenian Beirut built something no other diaspora community quite matched. Workshops filled the ground floors: shoemakers, tailors, jewelers, metalworkers, printers. Above them were schools, clubs, choirs, theaters, sports teams and scout troops. There were Armenian newspapers, Armenian political parties with seats in the Lebanese parliament, and in 1955 an Armenian university, Haigazian.

In 1930 the Catholicosate of Cilicia, the church's see that had been driven out of Sis in 1921, settled for good in Antelias, just up the coast. With it, Lebanon became the center of the Western Armenian church, schools and publishing. Teachers trained in Beirut taught in Aleppo, Athens and Tehran; books printed there were read in Paris and Los Angeles. For a generation, if you wanted to know what good Western Armenian sounded like, you listened to Beirut.

Leaving, again and again

Bourj Hammoud has always been a place people left from as well as arrived in. In the 1940s many families sold their homes and sailed for Soviet Armenia in the repatriation, and Lebanese of every background, and later migrant workers, moved into what they left behind.

The civil war that began in 1975 was the great scattering. Armenian parties largely tried to keep the community out of the fighting, but the war came to them anyway: shelling, checkpoints, kidnappings, the collapse of the economy. Tens of thousands of Armenians left Lebanon over the next fifteen years, many for Los Angeles, Montreal, Sydney and Paris. A great many diaspora families who now say "we're from Beirut" mean this exact moment.

The arrivals did not stop either. After 2011, Armenians from Aleppo, many of them descendants of the same genocide survivors, came to Bourj Hammoud fleeing another war. In August 2020 the explosion at the port of Beirut, just across the river, tore through homes and shops in the neighborhood. Then came the economic collapse. Each time, more people left, and each time some stayed and swept up.

Why it matters at your table

If your family came through Beirut, a lot of what feels "Armenian" at home was probably shaped in Bourj Hammoud: the lahmajoun from the neighborhood ovens, the basterma and sujuk shops, the Western Armenian of the Beirut schools, the songs from the clubs, the way politics comes up at dinner. Many of the people who run Armenian schools, churches and newspapers in the diaspora today learned how in Beirut.

Ask your grandparents

1. Which quarter of Bourj Hammoud did we live in? Was it Nor Marash, Nor Adana, somewhere else?
2. Was the family in the camps at Karantina or Sanjak first?
3. What did the family do for work? Was there a shop or a workshop?
4. Which school did you go to, and which club were we in?
5. When did we leave Lebanon, and what was the last thing that made us go?

Add questions to your list