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3 - The
Saint Sarkis Hermitage, the Gibran Cemetery
The
cavern-hermitage, the Church, the monastery, the spiritual
heritage, the Phoenician vestiges, the nature of the land with
its fantastic turmoil and beauty, the enchantment of Wadi
Qadisha (Holy Valley)... all of these developed in Gibran when
still a child, his spiritual capacities. They also brought,
more than anything else, his deep and turbulent senses to
maturity, breeding in him a strong and firm style, along
with his imagination, created a power of conception and a
method of thinking unusual in their depth and scope. |
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As
a child, he bore them in himself, and as a visionary, they
carried him to the limits. At the age of twelve, he
traveled to Boston.
During his stay in Bsharri
and in Beirut (1898 - 1902) in order to learn Arabic and
French, he spent his summers soaking in the splendor and
the tempestuous history of |
the
two cities, as revealed by their mythology. They created
in him a soaring hymn and ardent desire to return to
them.
In 1926, he wrote to
his compatriot Youssef Torbey Rahmeh, an emigrant who had
returned to Bsharri, asking him to buy for him from the
Carmelite Fathers the hermitage, the monastery and the
adjoining forest in order to make of the hermitage his
tomb and of the monastery, as he expected to retire, a
seclusion where he would devote himself completely to his
artistic activities. |
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A view from
the balcony of the seclusion-monastery, overlooking the
Wadi Qadisha and the space beyond. |
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Despite
a policy forbidding sale of real estate, the Father
Superior accepted to sell, in consideration of Gibran's
spirituality, his world-wide reputation, and the unanimous
wish of the Bsharri people to see him return to what he
called his "heart's homeland". However, Gibran
was unable to realize his dream.
But he told his friends, and wrote in his will, his desire
to be buried in the hermitage
-cavern. He died on
April 10, 1931. |
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The people of
Bsharri encountered many difficulties, both in Lebanon and
in America, to recover Gibran's body. The Bsharri
Youth Committee and the Lebanese in general overcame these
difficulties and Gibran's remains reached Bsharri on
August 22, 1931. It was Mariana Gibran, his sister, who
bought the coveted real estate, using some of the money
left over by her brother. Within few months , the tomb was
excavated in the rock of the hermitage and his coffin was
placed in it.
The regard the
people of Bsharri had for their Gibran is illustrated by
the epitaph the builders of the tomb wrote above it:
"Here lies Gibran us". But one of the
impassioned people for his art, playing on the words,
modified the last two words to read "our
prophet". Gibran's first dream was realized and
he is now able to " hear in his eternal silence,
inside the hermitage, the voice of the flute that colors
the cheeks of the daisies in the field." The
expectation of the Bsharri people that the tomb would one
day be a shrine was also realized. Eventually, Mariana
donated the whole estate to the Gibran National Committee.
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