Beirut 1917: The Secret Diary That Spoke for a Starving City

In the depths of World War I, as famine and locusts ravaged Mount Lebanon, a young Maronite clerk named Khalil al-Houri began keeping a secret diary. His small leather notebook, buried in a wall for decades, records the collapse of a society: the price of a sack of wheat spiking from 2 piastres to 80, the sight of children eating grass on the streets of Beirut, and the slow horror of a people abandoned by their Ottoman overlords. Lucas and Luna explore how al-Houri's diary — now held in the archives of the American University of Beirut — offers an intimate counterpoint to the grand political narratives of the era. They compare his daily entries with official Ottoman telegrams and famine relief reports from the Syria Mission, revealing a gap between propaganda and reality that cost tens of thousands of lives. The episode also examines the diary's rediscovery in 1975, just as Lebanon's civil war began, and what it tells us about the fragility of civilian life in times of state collapse.

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