Behind its bullet-scarred facade and airy architecture, Beit Beirut holds a century of memory - Lebanon's golden age, civil war and economic crisis - shaped by architects, activists and fighters. As war returns to Lebanon once more, it stands as the city’s only real war memorial, and its enduring, silent witness.
Along one of Beirut’s main thoroughfares, wedged between glass towers and plastered apartment blocks, a once-grand building refuses to disappear. Its ornate facade and raised columns speak to an era of luxury and wealth - before the bullet holes arrived to tell a different story.
This is Beit Beirut - once called the Barakat Building, the Yellow House and the Building of Death - each indicating the lives it has lived in a city that has survived many. Today, as war returns to Lebanon, it stands as a reminder that this city has been here before. "It's a symbol of the city's memory," said Samira Ezzo, a tour guide who teaches visitors about Lebanon’s past.
The building was commissioned by Nicolas and Victoria Barakat in the early 1920s. The first design by Lebanese architect Youssef Afandi Aftimos was completed in 1924, before Fouad Kozah raised it by two floors eight years later. It stands on the crossroads of Damascus and Independence Streets, just beside Sodeco Square. Known for its ochre-coloured sandstone walls, this neo-Ottoman building was designed as two bourgeois-style homes four storeys high. It reads as a single volume from the street as the facades are joined by raised columns, and were once decorated with ornamental iron work. But step inside and the plan reveals itself. Arranged around an open central axis, the front courtyard frames the sky between the wings of the building. Two staircases flanking the courtyard provided access to homes, while a passage through the building led to a garden at the back.
“The architecture was really iconic,” said Ezzo. “Back when it was built, no other building was as tall as this one. So you can imagine during Independence Day or certain events, […] people living there had the privilege of an iconic view of the parades happening on Damascus street.” The building also saw several shops come and go. Two of them, a photography studio and a hairdressing salon, have been preserved.
When Lebanon’s Civil War broke out in 1975, Beit Beirut (then the Barakat Building) found itself on the demarcation line between east and west Beirut, which later became known as the green line. During the 15-year war, it was converted into a snipers’ den by Christian militias who turned its structural elegance into a killing machine. The building’s airy architecture gave the fighters unimpeded views across the city. They remodelled the structure, tearing down the staircases at the entrance and building concrete walls to fortify their positions. When the war ended in 1990, the Lebanese granted a blanket amnesty to all the fighters and demolished dozens of buildings, in what Ezzo called an “architectural massacre.” This was the fate that awaited Beit Beirut, until Mona Hallak, a local architect, campaigned to save it.
In a podcast from September 2024, she recalled how she stumbled upon the building when walking along the green line in 1994. “It was destroyed; not one single square centimetre was without a bullet. But it had all the beauty of the world - with its yellow stone, and the sun shining, and I remember the sky was so blue you could see it through the building.That day, I fell in love with the building, and I spent 23 years fighting for it,” she said. Her conservation eventually saw the Barakat Building turned into Beit Beirut, a museum that serves as the city’s only war memorial.
It was restored by the architect Youssef Haidar, who added metal beams on the facade and the interior, creating a kind of prosthetic skeleton. The garden was turned into a foyer, while the stairs built by Fouad Kozah were replaced by a winding ramp. Haidar’s restoration has proved controversial. In a 2016 interview, Mona Hallak said it “added an aggressive feel to the building that it did not have even in its war-scarred state.” She said his false bullet holes ridicule the original scars, and that his approach betrayed the transparency of the original plan.
For most Lebanese, the Civil War only exists through the memories of those who lived it. There has been no official reckoning, and it is not taught in schools. Beit Beirut’s current exhibition, Hkeeli - ‘tell me’ in Arabic - steps into that silence and attempts to uncover those stories, five decades since the Civil War began. It opened in April 2025, just months after the 2024 ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah, and is responding to the current war by opening its doors as a public space.
Since early March this year, Israel has intensified its attacks on Lebanon, focusing largely on the south and Dahiyeh - Beirut’s southern suburbs. More than 1,000 people have been killed, and around one million displaced.
“This building is speaking for itself,” said Nour Nasr, Hkeeli’s programme coordinator. “It was a beautiful building, […] and was a family home at the beginning. And then it was turned into this,” she said, pointing to fortifications created by fighters during the civil war. “Until now, after 51 years, [the Lebanese] never learned about what happened from one source. They are listening to the ideology of their parents,” she said.
Delphine Darmency, the director of the exhibition, explained they had to be careful when talking about the Civil War as the true extent of the violence is still not clear. “We don't want to bring data because we are still not sure about the data. So, the idea is more to share feelings about the building.” Darmency and Nasr related stories of ordinary people during the war, such as Fida Bizri - who saw corpses on the street and remembers a fighter pointing a gun at her outside her school.
On the first floor, a reinforced bunker with narrow slits between concrete blocks served as a sniper’s nest, with direct views onto the street outside. “Maybe this is a safer space now during this war,” Darmency said. A day earlier, Darmency, Nasr, and the rest of the staff had rushed out of Beit Beirut after Israeli forces announced they were targeting a building just a few hundred metres away.
In that context, Beit Beirut has become not just a memorial for the Civil War but a silent witness for all the repeated violence the Lebanese have faced. One room features an installation of the keys to homes that were lost or abandoned during the war in 2024. Darmency pointed to a notebook where visitors are asked to recall what smells remind them of war. Bizri’s was Eau de Javel, a bleach used to clean the streets after a massacre. “But many of the people who write are from the south or from Dahiyeh and are sharing the smells of war that we lived and are living now,” she said. “It's like the repetition of traumas is endless in Lebanon.”
