Lebanon’s Beirut Architectural and heritage enthusiasts are drawn to Beirut’s ancient Sursock Street, located in the center of the Achrafieh neighborhood, with its opulent Ottoman-era homes and palaces. The street is lined with small cafés, meandering streets, and pockets of greenery.
Most people are aware of the spectacular stucco ceilings of Sursock Palace and the breathtaking stained glass windows of Sursock Museum, which are located across from each other. These were the residences of the aristocratic Sursock family, one of Beirut’s seven founding families. They were prosperous merchants with connections to the Ottoman Empire.
On the same street, nevertheless, is a lesser-known historical treasure.
Slate-blue Villa Mokbel, a former Sursock property dating back to 1870, is tucked away behind iron gates covered in trailing plants. It hasn’t been seen by the public much, but a striking photo of the wrecked villa taken after the 2020 port blast—which shows a mural peeking through a collapsed wall—significantly raised its profile.
218 people were killed and 7,000 injured in the explosion, which was caused by 2,750 tonnes of incorrectly stored ammonium nitrate that caught fire. Approximately 300,000 people were rendered homeless. With the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the blast was the third greatest in history, and Villa Mokbel was completely destroyed.
Owner Georgie Mokbel tells Al Jazeera that the Sursock houses were the first exquisite large villas in Beirut, situated on the outskirts. He inherited the property from his father. “They worked with artisans in Lebanon and architects from Italy to create this distinctive Venetian-Florentine style, with a hint of Ottoman influences.”
According to Mokbel, the architects of Lebanese houses being constructed or refurbished in Gemmayzeh and Pasture, which are located downhill from the wealthier Ashrafieh neighborhood, started to imitate this design on a smaller scale, but they continued to include triple arcade windows and red roof tiles. Roof tiles were not used in Lebanon prior to this time. These days, this Ottoman, Lebanese, and Italian architectural fusion is regarded as the standard dwelling.
Still grand after all these years
The original owner of the property that became known as Villa Mokbel was Alexandre Sursock. The mansion was listed for sale when Alexandre’s family departed Lebanon in the 1930s and married into Italian nobility.The opulent 2,000 square meter (21,527 square foot) mansion, which was purchased by several families, was eventually divided into smaller flats; Mokbel is unsure of the exact date. Among such investors was Mokbel’s grandfather, Gebran Mokbel, a former construction worker who became a real estate mogul. Perceiving the villa’s magnificent rooms as an alluring investment, he purchased shares in it.
The home is spread across three magnificent stories and features triple arches, sweeping marble staircases, elaborate ceilings with gold leaf decoration, and a gilded oval glass cupola over the stairs. The great main halls feel spacious because of the high ceiling and lots of windows that let in plenty of natural light. The mansion nevertheless retains the grandeur and beauty of its heyday, despite the fact that it is in dire need of repair—the ceilings need to be restored, and the walls and balconies need to be rebuilt.
Georgie Mokbel is especially enamored of the fine details found in the coving decorations and stucco ceilings in several of the rooms, which feature figures and symbols that allude to their historical uses. The dining room is decorated with classical portraits of fruit, wheat chaffs, and cornucopias; the amusement areas are furnished with ornate musical instruments.
The house has witnessed lavish parties over the years; the Sursocks frequently welcomed foreign dignitaries, monarchy, and Lebanon’s upper society due to their bourgeois status and political connections. Later on, it functioned as a school and a movie set for the 1969 movie Appointment in Beirut, directed by Italian Nino Zanchin. But it’s vacant now.
The scars of civil war
The villa has also sustained damage from past conflicts, including the horrific 1975–1990 Civil War in Beirut, which claimed the lives of about 150,000 people due to fighting between sectarian militias. The mansion was most famously destroyed in the port explosion on August 4, 2020; the elaborate ceilings caved down as the stone walls disintegrated.
Many would have seen the villa for the first time after Vanity Fair magazine released a photo by photographer Dia Mrad that showed a mural of well-known Lebanese poet and author Khalil Gibran peeking through the crumbling walls. The devastation felt by many was portrayed by Gibran’s somber and regretful stare directed outward, as though he was also lamenting the state of Beirut.
The villa has served as more than just a noble home since World War II. Then, according to Mokbel, “they were afraid of famine, like there was in World War I,” the state of Lebanon had requested the owners for permission to store grain in the basement of the villa.
200,000 people died as a result of the Great Famine of Mount Lebanon between 1915 and 1918. In order to undermine the Ottoman economy and war effort—which had aligned with Germany and Austria-Hungary—the Allied forces had been blockading the Eastern Mediterranean. Combining a locust plague with the Ottoman Empire’s Fourth Army commander Jamal Pasha’s prohibition of importing crops from neighboring Syria in reaction to the Allied blockade, the famine turned into one of Lebanon’s deadliest periods.
Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire shortly after World War I, Lebanon was placed under French Mandate rule in 1923 and became independent in 1943, midway through the Second World War. In the event that blockades were imposed, the recently established administration attempted to take measures to prevent starvation since it was determined not to let the past happen again. Lebanon enlisted with the Allied forces to fight Japan and Germany in 1945.
After that, Pigier University, the oldest business school in Lebanon, rented Villa Mokbel for a short while. The family decided to make the villa a company and use a portion of the rent to pay for the repairs since they needed the money to fix it. Nevertheless, the tenancy and additional repair plans came to an end after the 2006 conflict with Israel, as the villa sustained damage once more and the school looked for a new location in the Hamra neighborhood.
When MC Saatchi, a communications business, saw the villa in 2008, they fell in love with it and offered to totally repair it in exchange for a lower rent.
