A new book explores life in one of the 20th century’s worst disasters
The famine memorial devised by Youssef Hoyek in 1930 featuring a Muslim and a Christian mother mourning the loss of their children is now on display in the Sursock Museum in Beirut. Photograph: Hannah McCarthy
Death figures for the famine range from 80,000 to more than 200,000 . “Evading the Ottoman census was a proud tradition for people across the region,” Brand explains to The Irish Times, so attempting to estimate death figures based on census data is “meaningless” because of how unreliable it is.
Jirjis Khuri Maqdisi, a professor at AUB’s precursor, the Syrian Protestant College, wrote during the famine: “In 1915, the sight of a starving man falling would cause people to surround him and give him some water, some food and some dirhams.” By 1916, most people would walk by children lying in the mud crying out for bread – “most frequently, on passing, people turned their face and blocked their ears so they could not see or hear”.
“The Ottomans bear a large part of the responsibility, but they did not engineer the famine,” says Hayek who runs Heritage and Roots, a public history platform. The Martyrs' Statue in Beirut by Italian artist Marino Mazzacurati. It depicts men executed in Beirut in 1916 on the orders of Jamal Pasha, the much-loathed Ottoman leader who oversaw the autonomous region of Mount Lebanon. Photograph: Hannah McCarthy