I am 38 years old, and this is my first time in Lebanon.
Most of my family left generations ago, eventually settling in Montreal, Canada. And yet Lebanon was never entirely absent from our lives. Like so many children and grandchildren of the Lebanese diaspora, I grew up with a country I had never seen but somehow already knew.
Or thought I knew.
For years, I was told that Lebanon was the most beautiful country in the world.
The mountains. The Mediterranean. The food. The history. The warmth of its people. A country where you could ski in the morning and swim in the sea in the afternoon. A country impossibly rich for its size, where civilizations had layered themselves one upon another for thousands of years. Phoenicians, Romans, Byzantines, Ottomans. Byblos, Baalbek, Beirut. Names that seemed to carry the weight of the ancient world.
And then there was the Lebanon of family mythology: beautiful, sophisticated, generous, cosmopolitan. A place people had been forced to leave but never quite stopped belonging to.
So I came here with expectations.
Perhaps that was unfair.
Because Lebanon is beautiful. Spectacularly so, at times. The Mediterranean appears suddenly between buildings. Mountains rise almost directly from the sea. The light is extraordinary. There are moments when you understand immediately why generations of Lebanese people abroad speak about this country with such longing.
But my overwhelming feeling, arriving here for the first time, has not been wonder.
It has been sadness.
Not because Lebanon lacks beauty, history or culture. Quite the opposite.
Because it possesses so much of all three—and seems, too often, unable to protect them.
At Byblos, one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, I expected to feel the enormity of human history. Instead, I found myself distracted by how little seemed to have been done to honour it. Extraordinary ruins sit with interpretation that feels inadequate to their significance. Around them, commerce presses in. The experience can feel strangely casual for a place that should leave you speechless.
And that became a recurring feeling: not that Lebanon has little to offer, but that what it has inherited is so extraordinary that its neglect feels almost painful.
There is a tiredness here.
You see it in infrastructure. In unfinished buildings and neglected public spaces. In extraordinary landscapes interrupted by haphazard development. In places of immense historical importance that, elsewhere in the world, would be meticulously preserved, interpreted and presented as national treasures.
It would be easy—and deeply unfair—to look at all of this and simply blame the Lebanese people.
Lebanon has endured civil war, occupations, assassinations, political paralysis, economic collapse, the destruction of its currency and savings, the Beirut port explosion, and repeated regional conflict. People have spent decades adapting to institutions that repeatedly fail them. Survival itself has become a kind of national expertise.
But understanding why something has happened does not make it less heartbreaking to witness.
Perhaps it makes it more so.
Because beneath the exhaustion, you can still see the country people told me about.
It appears in fragments.
In a table overflowing with food nobody will allow you to stop eating. In an old stone house hidden behind concrete. In the mountains descending toward the Mediterranean. In a stranger insisting on helping you. In the effortless mixture of Arabic, French and English. In families who left seventy or a hundred years ago and still tell their children where they came from.
Lebanon has somehow remained larger in the imagination of its diaspora than its geography should permit.
And perhaps that is why coming here can hurt.
We inherited Lebanon at its most beautiful.
Memory preserved the mountains but not the electrical cuts. It preserved the villages but not the traffic. It preserved Beirut as cosmopolitan and glamorous, Byblos as ancient and eternal, the food as incomparable, the people as indestructible.
Diaspora has a way of freezing a homeland at the moment it was left.
The country, of course, kept living.
And suffering.
I came to Lebanon expecting to discover something that had been missing from my identity. Instead, I found myself mourning something I had never actually known.
That may be the strangest part of returning to a place your family left generations before you: it is possible to feel nostalgia for a country that never belonged to your own memory.
And still, every morning in Beirut, the sun comes up over the Mediterranean.
People open their shops. Coffee is poured. Horns begin sounding in the streets. Families gather around tables. The city moves again.
There is something almost defiant about the ordinariness of it.
Lebanon does not need another outsider—or a member of its diaspora arriving like one—to romanticize its suffering. Resilience is beautiful from a distance. Up close, it can also mean that people have been required to endure far more than they ever should have.
Nor does Lebanon need to be told that it was once magnificent.
The evidence is everywhere.
What it deserves is the chance to treat what remains—its landscapes, its history, its cities, its people—as though they are worth protecting.
I don’t know what Lebanon will become. After 38 years of hearing about this country, a first visit has left me with fewer certainties than I arrived with.
I know only that I understand the longing now.
Not because I found the Lebanon I had been promised.
Because, every so often, I caught a glimpse of it.
And perhaps that is why, despite everything, people keep believing in this place.
The night can be very long here.
But the sun always rises in Beirut.