47 Fun Facts About Lebanon

What is the capital and largest city of Lebanon?

Beirut. Banking and tourism made it the 'Paris of the Middle East' in the 1960s, until the civil war that began in 1975 split the city into a Christian east and a Muslim west.

Which northern port is Lebanon's second-largest city?

Tripoli. Its Greek name means 'three cities': ancient writers say settlers from three Phoenician ports each founded a quarter of their own there, a short walk apart.

Which invention did the Phoenicians of the Lebanese coast carry across the Mediterranean, where the Greeks adopted it?

The alphabet. Their 22 letters stood for consonants only; the Greeks borrowed the set and added vowels, and the Latin letters used for English descend from that Greek version.

Which ancient Lebanese port is thought to have given Greek its word for papyrus?

Byblos. Egyptian papyrus reached Greece through the port, so the Greeks seem to have named the material after it; 'biblion', a papyrus scroll, later became the word for a book.

According to the Bible, which king of Tyre supplied timber and craftsmen for Solomon's Temple?

Hiram. The Book of Kings has him float the logs down the coast as rafts in return for yearly shipments of wheat and olive oil, and Solomon later hands him twenty towns in Galilee.

Alexander the Great absorbed the Phoenician city-states after besieging which city in 332 BC?

Tyre. The island city held out for seven months until Alexander built a causeway to its walls; silt then gathered around it, which is why Tyre has been joined to the mainland ever since.

Which Roman general brought the Lebanese coast under Rome's rule in 64 BC?

Pompey. His conquest closed three centuries of Hellenistic rule that had begun with Alexander, and Rome and then Byzantium went on to hold the coast for some seven hundred years.

Baalbek is famous for the ruins of Roman temples dedicated to Bacchus and which other god?

Jupiter. The Romans merged him with Baal, the sky god long worshipped on the site, and built over the older shrine one of the largest temples in their whole empire.

Roman Berytus, on the coast of modern Lebanon, was famous across the empire for its school of what?

Law. Its jurists helped shape Justinian's great legal code and the city was called the 'mother of laws', until an earthquake and tsunami wrecked it in 551.

The Druze religion emerged in the 11th century from a branch of what?

Shia Islam. The faith grew out of its Ismaili branch in Fatimid Cairo around 1017, then shut its doors: the Druze accept no converts, so the only way in is to be born into the community.

Which Druze emir, executed by the Ottomans in 1635, is remembered as a founder of the Lebanese entity?

Fakhr al-Din II. He united most of what is now Lebanon under his own rule and courted Europe with trade and military pacts, even sheltering in Tuscany for a time, before the sultan sent an army to bring him down.

The Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate of 1861–1918 was created as an autonomous homeland for which community?

Maronite Christians, the majority in Mount Lebanon, gained a self-governing district under a Christian governor after the 1860 clashes in which thousands of Christians were killed by the Druze.

Which disaster of 1915 deepened Mount Lebanon's wartime famine?

A locust plague. An Allied sea blockade and Ottoman requisitions had already emptied the granaries when the swarms arrived and stripped what was left of the crops.

Greater Lebanon was created in 1920 under which body's mandate system?

The League of Nations. The mandate joined the coastal cities and the eastern farmlands to the old mountain district, drawing the borders that Lebanon still has today.

Lebanon's Independence Day, 22 November, marks which event of 1943?

Its jailed leaders freed: the president and his ministers had been arrested for abolishing the mandate, and an uprising backed by Allied pressure forced the authorities to free them.

Which Lebanese port city is guarded by a Crusader Sea Castle built on a small island just offshore?

Sidon. The city's most famous treasure is no longer there: the carved 'Alexander sarcophagus' dug from its royal cemetery was carried off to Istanbul, where it is still on show.

Before 1989, Lebanon's parliament seats were split six to five in favour of whom?

Christians. The ratio came from the 1932 census, which found a slim Christian majority; the peace deal that ended the civil war replaced it with an even split between Christians and Muslims.

Why has Lebanon not held a national census since 1932?

Sectarian numbers are too sensitive: seats in parliament and the top offices are shared out by religion on the strength of the 1932 figures, and a fresh count could upend the bargain.

Lebanon's civil war is dated from April 1975, when gunmen ambushed what?

A bus. Twenty-seven of its mostly Palestinian passengers were killed, the street clashes that followed spread across the country, and the fighting did not formally end until October 1990.

Which country militarily occupied Lebanon from 1976 to 2005?

Syria kept troops in Lebanon from its 1976 intervention in the civil war until the mass protests of 2005 forced a withdrawal, completed that April; Israel held a southern zone until 2000.

Hezbollah emerged in the early 1980s with financial support and training from which country?

Iran. Its Revolutionary Guards helped organise and train the group after Israel's invasion of 1982, and Tehran has remained Hezbollah's chief backer ever since.

Which former Lebanese prime minister was assassinated by a massive bomb in the capital on 14 February 2005?

Rafic Hariri. The billionaire businessman had led post-war rebuilding in two spells as prime minister; his killing set off mass rallies that brought down the government within weeks.

Who led Hezbollah for over 30 years until an air strike killed him in 2024?

Hassan Nasrallah. He had run the group since 1992; the 34-day war of 2006 began when his fighters seized two Israeli soldiers in a raid across the border.

The August 2020 explosion at Lebanon's main port was caused by a neglected stockpile of which chemical?

Ammonium nitrate. Some 2,750 tonnes of it had sat in a dockside warehouse since being confiscated from a cargo ship in 2014, and the blast brought down the government within days.

Which Hollywood actor was born in Lebanon's capital in 1964 and raised mostly in Toronto?

Keanu Reeves. His English mother and Hawaiian-born father were living in the city when he arrived, but the family soon moved on and he grew up thousands of miles away in Canada.

What tree is Lebanon's national emblem, shown in green on its flag?

Cedar. The forests that once covered the mountains were cut over thousands of years for ships, temples and palaces, and only scattered groves, such as the Cedars of God near Bsharri, survive.

On Lebanon's flag, what are the two red stripes commonly said to stand for?

Blood shed for freedom. Adopted in 1943, the design dropped the foreign tricolour of the mandate years but kept its green tree, now set on a central band that stands for peace and mountain snow.

The name Lebanon comes from an ancient Semitic root meaning what?

White. The root l-b-n probably refers to the snow that caps the mountains for much of the year, though some trace it instead to the pale limestone of their cliffs.

Lebanon's geography famously lets visitors do which two things in a single day?

Ski and swim in the sea. The slopes lie within about 45 minutes' drive of the Mediterranean beaches, and for much of winter and spring both are open on the same day.

How do visitors tour the lower cave of Lebanon's Jeita Grotto?

By boat. An underground river fills the lower gallery, so small boats carry visitors along it; the same river supplies drinking water to the capital, 18 km away.

Which mountain, the highest of the Anti-Lebanon range, straddles Lebanon's south-eastern border?

Mount Hermon. It crowns the range that faces Mount Lebanon across the country's main farming valley, which is how that range got its Greek name, 'opposite Lebanon'.

Which country is home to the largest community of Lebanese descent outside Lebanon?

Brazil. Migration began in the late 1870s, and on some official counts more people of Lebanese descent now live there than in Lebanon itself; one of them, Michel Temer, became president.

Which European language do roughly two in five Lebanese speak?

French. It was an official language beside Arabic under the mandate that ran the country from 1920, and though it lost that status at independence in 1943, it is still widely taught in schools.

Lebanese-American author Kahlil Gibran, born in Bsharri, is best known for which 1923 book?

The Prophet. Its 26 prose-poem sermons have never been out of print since 1923, and in the 1960s the book found a second life as a bible of the counterculture.

Which Lebanese singer, born Nouhad Haddad, married the composer Assi Rahbani?

Fairuz, born Nouhad Haddad, married Assi Rahbani; he and his brother Mansour wrote her early songs at the national radio station and shaped her career for decades.

Kibbeh, one of Lebanon's national dishes, is a pie of finely minced lamb and what?

Burghul, the parboiled cracked wheat, is pounded with the lamb to form the kibbeh shell; tabbouleh, the other national dish, uses the same grain with parsley and tomatoes.

Lebanese restaurant meals traditionally open with a spread of small dishes called what?

Mezze. The spread can be as simple as pickles, hummus and bread, or it can grow into grilled meats, seafood and salads that become the whole meal, traditionally with a glass of arak alongside.

Arak, the Levantine spirit, gets its licorice taste from which ingredient?

Aniseed. It goes in at the second distillation of the grape spirit, and its oil, which dissolves in alcohol but not in water, is why clear arak turns milky the moment it is diluted.

The ruins of Anjar, a UNESCO site in the Beqaa Valley, were built by which caliphate?

Umayyad princes built Anjar in the early 8th century, a foundation usually credited to the caliph al-Walid I; the modern village beside the ruins was settled in 1939 by Armenians who had fled Musa Dagh.

The Kadisha Valley, a UNESCO-listed gorge of ancient monasteries, has a name meaning what in Aramaic?

Holy. The Aramaic word is close kin to the Hebrew 'kadosh'; the gorge earned the name as a refuge for hermits, whose caves pit cliffs that are still hard to reach.

What is Lebanon's currency, pegged near 1,500 to the dollar until 2023?

The pound. The official rate of 1,507.5 to the dollar lasted from 1997 until February 2023, when the central bank cut it by 90% in a day, and the street rate was by then far weaker still.

Lebanon's National Pact assigns the post of prime minister to which community?

Sunni Muslim is the prime minister's confession under the 1943 pact, an unwritten deal between President Bechara el-Khoury and Premier Riad al-Solh.

By 2014 roughly one in four people living in Lebanon belonged to which group?

Refugees. The UN registered its millionth arrival from the war next door in April 2014, giving a small country the highest share of refugees per head of population anywhere in the world.

Under the National Pact, the speaker of Lebanon's parliament must come from which community?

Shia Muslim. The rule was never written down, and as of 2026 one man, Nabih Berri, had occupied the speaker's chair without a break since 1992.

Which river, the longest lying wholly within Lebanon, turns west to the sea through a gorge below Beaufort Castle?

The Litani. It has served as a military line as well as a water supply: the Israeli invasion of 1978, which pushed as far as its banks, was code-named Operation Litani.

The 1989 accord that ended Lebanon's civil war is named after which Saudi city?

Taif. Lebanon's surviving MPs, last elected in 1972, met there to endorse a charter that moved much of the president's authority to the cabinet and rebalanced the seats in parliament.

Which former army commander was elected Lebanon's president in January 2025 after a two-year vacancy?

Joseph Aoun. Army chief since 2017, he won once the candidate Hezbollah preferred stood aside, six weeks after a ceasefire ended a war with Israel that had left the group badly weakened.