São Paulo – Publishing house Dar Saer Mashrek, from Beirut, launched this month the second edition of a travel, history, archaeology, religion and cultural guide about Lebanon turned mainly to Brazilians. The work, called Líbano – Um oásis no Oriente Médio (Lebanon – An Oasis in the Middle East), is by writer Roberto Khatlab, who lives in the Arab country, where he is the head of the Latin American Culture and Study Centre at Saint Esprit de Kaslik University. Khatlab is the author of several books on the matter on themes like the Lebanese immigration and history of religion.
The publication, in Portuguese, had the support of the Ministry of Tourism of Lebanon and will be presented at the World Travel Market, a fair in the travel sector to take place from April 23rd to 25th, at Transamérica Expo Center, in São Paulo. It will also be shown at the 1st Brazil-Lebanon Tourism and Business Forum, on April 26th, at Ceasar Park Hotel, in the state of Rio de Janeiro, according to figures disclosed by Khatlab.
“In Lebanon, people enter the tunnel of time and visit five, seven, eight thousand years of history. In central Beirut and other cities we find the past and the present, a true living open-sky museum with dynamic and hospitable people,” said the author, recalling that the Brazilians tend to feel at home in the country, as it is rare to fund a Lebanese who has not lived in or visited Brazil. “Lebanon is a piece of Brazil in the Middle East,” said Khatlab.
The second edition, which was updated and expanded, has 322 pages. The work brings information like the history and geography of 200 cities and villages, archaeological sites, culture, gastronomy, population, customs, important people. It also shows what the country has to offer in ecotourism, architecture, tradition, legends, myths, museums, routes and religious temples. In the book, sites for Druze spiritual study, Christian, Islamic and Druze pilgrimage sites, and the places visited by Jesus, Mary, apostles and saints are shown.
In some of the cities described in the guide there are short biographies by Brazilian writers whose families are from these sites, like Milton Hatoum, Salim Miguel, Raduan Nassar, as well as Lebanese personalities, like Gibran Khalil, Mikhail Naimy, Ameen Rihani. In the book, Khatlab also describes the places visited by Brazil’s emperor Peter II, in 1876, when he visited the country, and sites where there is great Brazilian presence, communities that speak Portuguese or have Brazilian references, statues or images of saints in their streets. The writer also shows a timeline of relations between Brazil and Lebanon from 1876 to 2013.
*Translated by Mark Ament
