Aline Kamakian is commanding an operation to feed 2,000 people in need. First the Armenian restaurateur and her staff prepare meals at her sister restaurant, Batchig, outside central Beirut. Then the meals are distributed from a tent outside her second restaurant in central Beirut. When we speak, Kamakian frequently has to pause to give instructions to her team or answer one of the many phone calls she receives. Tomorrow she wants to distribute even more meals. “It’s therapeutic,” she tells me. “It’s keeping me busy, it’s keeping my team busy.”
Kamakian is the owner of Mayrig, the first restaurant to bring Armenian cuisine to the broader food scene in Lebanon. “This was my father’s dream,” she tells me. After his parents fled the Armenian genocide, Kamakian says he always dreamed of one day having a place where his friends could taste home. “You could say I realized the dreams of my father with the tools of my mother because I learned how to cook from her.”
Aline Kamakian
I’m in Beirut’s Mar Mikhael. From the cutting edge ateliers to the hip bookstore-cum-coffeeshops, this is the place to be. Cheap rents and hipster clientele make it the perfect location to set up a business as an artist or creative. Or it did. Two weeks ago, an explosion ripped through the Lebanese capital and this area now stands in pieces. The blast – caused by over 2,700 tons of chemicals poorly stored for years at the city’s port – killed over 200 people, injured thousands more, and devastated the city.
Kamakian’s restaurant Mayrig, or ‘mother’ in Armenian, did not fare well in the explosion. Built in an old Ottoman house, it’s a beautiful example of the architecture of the time and, in better days, it was one of the best restaurants in Beirut. Now it’s been two weeks since the blast, and while most of the glass and debris is gone, it’s hard to recall what it once looked like. The glass seating area where most people dined has completely disappeared. The carefully designed interior, which perfectly married traditional with modern, has been gutted. But Kamakian doesn’t stop for breath. “I don’t have the luxury to give up,” she says, referring to the 85 employees that rely on her for their income. “Even in 2006, during the war, we were open.”
The blast reduced much of Beirut’s Mar Mikhael neighborhood to rubble. PATRICK BAZGETTY IMAGES
Kamakian, who was at the restaurant at the time of the explosion, lost an ear in the blast. Despite her injuries, she managed to give CPR to a staff member, stem his bleeding and bring him down a damaged stairwell. When she finally got outside, Kamakian says she expected to see ambulances waiting. Instead, she emerged to “apocalyptic” scenes, and had to beg a motorbike driver to take the injured colleague to the hospital. Yet she counts herself as one of the lucky ones. Despite the damage to the restaurant, injuries, and trauma, she and all her staff thankfully survived the blast. Their survival, she says, is “priceless.”
But while she is thankful for her life, Kamakian has lost her life’s work. For the artists, architects, designers and restaurateurs who have forged their careers in this little strip of Beirut – many of them women – it’s a devastating blow. Fashion designer Cynthia Merhej described the blast as a “massacre of the creative industry.” And for women like Kamakian, the journey to success wasn’t easy. In order to secure a business loan to open Mayrig, she says she needed a male guarantor, but with her father dead and no husband, she had to turn to her male cousin. Determined to fight for other’s rights, Kamakian is on the board of the Lebanese League for Women in Business which aims to get women on at least 25 percent of boards by 2023.
Maria Halios, a furniture designer whose gallery is down the road from Mayrig, is another female pioneer in the area. She says she was the first female furniture designer in Lebanon, creating all metal designs. “It was a revolutionary thing back then. It was seen as a man’s material,” she says laughing. She returned to Lebanon in 1996, having forged a successful design career in Paris. When Halios walked into the building that was to be her gallery, it had been bombed in the Lebanese civil war and left derelict for 15 years. She renovated it, and slowly watched as the creative community blossomed here. “I was the first one here. It was an area of auto shops and AC repair shops. It was really a man’s area.”
We’re sitting in the empty shell of her gallery, drinking homemade lemonade she brought in a thermos. Maria’s elderly landlady calls in. They run an inventory of who made it, and who didn’t. “My heart feels torn out,” she says. Her love for hard materials like metal has only strengthened since the explosion; her favorite piece, a sculptural cast brass base with a marble top that took six months of work, was the only thing that survived unscathed.
Maria HaliosRAM01
The business had only just been getting back on track, she tells me. Protests erupted across Lebanon in October, calling for an overhaul of a broken political system. Since then, the situation has only gotten worse. The Covid-19 pandemic has intensified an economic crisis, pushing more than half a million children in Beirut alone into a struggle for survival. In a matter of months, the Lebanese pound lost 80 percent of its value and people watched their life savings dwindle to nothing. The explosion is the latest blow for a city already on its knees. “I have survived the revolution. I have survived the economic crisis. And now this,” says Halios.
One week on and the glass and debris has been swept away from many of the businesses I visited. The attention is now on what’s next. Many are reeling from the lack of government support, “Do you see any army? Do you see municipality people?” Kamakian asks of the lack of help from the authorities. “It’s the young generation that is coming to clean up.” Thousands of teenagers and young adults appear to be doing the bulk of the work here, as soldiers stand idly on road corners.
“I have survived the revolution. I have survived the economic crisis. And now this.”
The anger at the government has intensified after it emerged that the years of government inaction and negligence led to the explosion. Thousands poured onto the streets to protest and the Lebanese government has since resigned. It’s in this climate of uncertainty that the business owners I spoke to have to find paths forward. Kamakian, like many others, has started a GoFundMe to repair the damage in the absence of government support. But as she tells me about it, she breaks down. “I’ve always been a self-made woman … It’s really difficult for me to ask for help.”
Now it’s up to them to save not only their businesses, but also this unique area. Everyone who knows Beirut knows the particular magic of the neighbourhoods of Mar Mikhael and Gemmayzeh. “This is the creative hub of Beirut,” says Halios. And as we walk down the street together, I can see this. The designer behind the genderless fashion brand Boyfriend pulls over in his car to say hello, and another of Halios’s friends – an architect – joins us. The heritage buildings, owned for generations by the same families, have maintained their original glory. “It’s my family,” she says.
Cynthia Raffoul COURTESY
Preserving the area’s unique character won’t be easy. Developers have allegedly been offering to buy the damaged and destroyed heritage buildings, but many are concerned it could become commercialized like downtown Beirut. I stop into jewelery designer Cynthia Raffoul’s ruined boutique, and she tells me how the downtown area used to be full of life. “My uncle used to film. I have videos of what it used to be,” she says. The area was subjected to a post-war reconstruction that replaced much of its character with designer stores like Hermes and Dior. It’s become even more eerily quiet as the situation in Lebanon has deteriorated. “They killed its history … We can’t make the same mistakes here.”
None of the women I spoke to are under any illusions that an easy path lies before them. But they are determined to survive.
“It’s the easiest decision to turn your back and close…but I refuse,” says Kamakian. “I don’t know what will happen. I don’t have a strategy …I’m just trying to survive and help.”
If you want to help the people of Beirut’s creative industry—many of them women—you can donate to Slow Factory’s Super Fund for Beirut.
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