Don Mccullin in Baalbek
A shared love of Roman ruins drew legendary photographer Don Mccullin and writer Barnaby Rogerson to Lebanon’s ancient cities
On the first morning of our fortnight in Lebanon, I knocked lightly on the door of Don Mccullin’s room to check he was up. It was dark; we were hoping to catch a nearby temple in the first light of dawn. The door immediately swung open, and Don, 84, appeared, bags packed, camera case to the fore.
The shadow of a grin crept across his face as he met my glance. ‘Up at last, I see,’ he said. ‘Only you could have slept through your mate making such a din.’
He meant the muezzin, calling the dawn prayer.
Sir Don Mccullin, fresh from his retrospective at Tate Britain, is one of the world’s most famous photographers, yet he’s always happy to bed down in a simple hostel when there’s a picture to be captured. He is an artist with the internal discipline of a master craftsman.
Lean and still horribly good looking, he has a thick mop of silver hair crowning
a tanned face, lit by a pair of startling blue eyes: Michael Caine crossed with Steve Mcqueen.
If you want to find out what it is like to be invisible, walk into a bar beside him. I still chuckle in delight at the memory of being pushed expertly to one side by a skilful hand, as the other popped a telephone number in Don’s top pocket, alongside a silky little whisper: ‘Call me.’
I am a plump, balding publisher of travel books with an immense capacity for wine, parties and picnics. We make an odd pair of travellers. One of us is armed with a neat canister of camera lens, the other burdened by bags of books, badly folded maps, dog-eared pamphlets and emergency items – corkscrew and hat.
Driven by a shared passion for the ruins of the Roman empire – a time-battered portrait bust, a limbless god or a theatre slowly cascading down the hillside – we travel well together.
Don’s beautiful wife, Catherine, joined us. I liked her input, which got us swimming in the sea between medieval turrets at Tyre and a useful upgrade in our hotel bedrooms.
Once on site, Don and I ignore each other. I scamper about, walking my
way into knowledge of the landscape and talking to archaeologists, when they will put up with me.
Don is a man possessed, pacing around a much tighter focus, as he battles in his mind with shifting patterns of light, shadow, clouds, perspective and composition.
We seldom make a plan, let alone communicate by phone, for we understand that neither of us will have finished until we are finished. Occasionally I hear Don’s powerful whistle, used for one purpose: ‘Get out of my line of sight.’
Only in the burnt-out light of midday, or when it is dark, do we talk. He is a brilliant mimic and has worked with my travel-writer heroes. Out come stories about adventures with Norman Lewis, Eric Newby, Bruce Chatwin and The Oldie’s Brigid Keenan, who first introduced us, complete with Don’s startling impressions of them.
We began in Beirut, where Don gave a lecture. His images of the worst modern horror stories – Biafra, Cyprus and the Congo, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Cambodia, Northern Ireland – set off a hum of liberal concern.
Historians will look back on the late-20th century as a golden age for mankind; an era of peace, freedom, continual growth and prosperity – for the West. Not always so for the rest of the world.
At one point, Don projected onto the screen an image of a beautiful, ardent, young Christian Lebanese woman, throwing a hand grenade from balcony of the Holiday Inn, Beirut, in 1976.
As Don’s talk finished, someone handed him their mobile phone. On the other end was the young woman with the hand grenade, wanting to have a quick, last word. After they had finished talking, a large man came up, embraced Don and talked about his work running an interfaith cultural foundation. Most of the audience smiled at this public encounter. Thirty years ago, the man had been the commander of a notorious militia group.
For the next two weeks, Don and I had a hit list of three things we had to see and a further handful we wanted to see if the situation on the ground permitted.
The National Museum in Beirut is a carefully selected gathering of 5,000 years of artefacts, sculpture, jewellery, mosaics and frescoes – an aesthetic treat and a deep historical immersion.
Both of us had, at different times, been to the Temple of Baalbek. But the more you get to know this temple – on some historians’ lists one of the ten wonders of the ancient world – the more it calls you back, as you realise what you have missed. Also we were determined to stay at Baalbek’s Palmyra Hotel, one of the last of the old turn-of-the-century hotels to have survived and kept its character.
The third must-see was Byblos, a dusty archaeological site beneath an impressive Crusader castle, with the most astonishing variety of historical levels and occupation. Walk 20 paces and you travel a thousand years.
By great good fortune, and thanks to our efficient driver, we saw everything on our wish list: the Crusader castle at Beaufort, the Roman circus at Tyre, the temple at Niha, the old city of Sidon, the Holy Valley of the Maronite Christians and the old city of Tripoli. There’s still plenty left for the next trip.
The political situation is lively at the moment, with street demonstrations against government corruption and inefficiency. Nevertheless, the
democratically elected government of the Lebanon is one of the surviving miracles of the Middle East, a constitutional coalition of ethnic communities: Maronite Christians, Sunni Muslims, the Druze and Shia Muslims.
There are hundreds of thousands of refugees from Palestine in the Lebanese camps they have been living in since as far back as 1948, and millions more recent Syrian refugees; not to mention Israeli jets streaming in from the south. Saudi Arabia and its Gulf partners are largely underwriting the rebuilding of Lebanon after the destruction of the civil war (1975–1990).
Everywhere we went the food was astonishingly fresh and good. Hotels are expensive, charging the same as you would pay in Britain or America; dollars are accepted.
The best English guidebook is published by Bradt, and I strongly recommend the anthology Lebanon: Through Writers’ Eyes by Ted Gorton and Andree Feghali Gorton, published by Eland (where I must confess I work).
On our last night in Lebanon, we ate fish in a restaurant built on wooden stilts over the sea, beside the Phoenician walls at Batroun. There were no other travellers, though the recent street unrest had not yet begun. The only interruption to our meal had been from scuba divers emerging from the sea to bring the evening catch to the kitchen.
The conversation came round to heroes, and I confessed that the more closely I got to know many writers (as opposed to their work), the less I admired them.
I asked Don if he was running out of heroes. There was something in the rapidity and confidence of his reply that reminded me of the exceptional nature of the man I had been travelling with for ten days. He listed the composers Purcell and Bach, the writer Primo Levi, Daniel Barenboim and Yacoub (an Egyptian heart specialist).
His wife joined in, confessing that she loved the late Jonathan Miller. She then added, ‘I could never go back to publicschool boys, not after Don.’