Baalbek

Baalbek is where Rome built biggest: on a terrace in the Bekaa valley, at eleven hundred and fifty metres between the Lebanon and the Anti-Lebanon ranges, the emperors of the first to third centuries raised to Jupiter Heliopolitanus the largest temple of the ancient world — its six surviving columns, twenty-two metres high, stand on a podium of blocks so vast that three of them, the trilithon, weigh eight hundred tonnes each, and in the quarry down the hill the Stone of the Pregnant Woman, a thousand tonnes, was never moved. Beside it the temple of Bacchus is the best-preserved great temple of the Roman world, its door carved with vines and its columns still holding the roofline; the hexagonal court and the Great Court with their altars lead in from the propylaea; the round temple of Venus stands apart. A UNESCO site since 1984, it is the reason the Palmyra Hotel opened opposite in 1874 and kept a guest book from Cocteau to Agatha Christie, and the reason the Baalbek festival has put orchestras among the columns each July since 1956; the town around it is a market town of the Bekaa, two hours from Beirut, with the Umayyad city of Anjar and the vineyards of Ksara and Zahlé on the road.

The traveller who has cause to be there comes up from Beirut for the day, or sleeps a night at the Palmyra for its ghosts, and gives the temples the whole morning: the propylaea and the hexagonal court, the Great Court with its two altars and its pools, the six columns from below and from the podium's edge, Bacchus in the afternoon light when the carving is deepest, the little museum in the tunnels under the court, and the walk down to the quarry to stand beside the stone; a plate of kibbeh in the town; and, on the road back, Ksara's cellars for a glass and Anjar's Umayyad palace, if the day allows.

The Guide's honesty, gently: the Bekaa's winds have been hard — the valley has known the war of 2024 close by, the strikes came within sight of the columns, and chancelleries counsel against travel to the region —, and the Guide does not argue with them; for those with cause to be there, the temples stand, the site opens, the town is warm and its checkpoints are ordinary; the traveller checks conditions the week they go, travels with a Lebanese driver who knows the day's road, and turns back without argument if the road says so; and the six columns against the Anti-Lebanon at dusk are, plainly, the grandest thing Rome left standing anywhere, which is why the Guide keeps this page ready and its counsel gentle.