This beautiful piece of art is hardly talked about or even known to tourists. It is basically a symbolic cemetery to honor the victims of the famine between 1915 and 1918. During that period, more than half the population died or migrated, and there really wasn’t anything in the city to tell the story of Lebanon’s wars. The only thing that remained as a memory of the famine were the trees, which is why Yazan Halwani, a well known Lebanese artist chose to use a tree as a symbol. There’s an inscription on a plate there that translates something to “As Lebanese, we have a memory loss about the wars that happened and that is why wars keep happening in order to keep reminding us of the past wars”.
This artwork was created out of metal and it took over a year and a half to complete. Each leaf forms the words of revered writers that were contemporary with the famine such as Tawfik Yusuf Awwad and Khalil Gibran, whose poem “dead are my people” was dedicated to the famine’s victims!
