Life in the Town of Zahle

Michael Hatzbanian is now an eighty-one year old man, living in Glendale, California.  Every morning he wakes up around ten.  He reads the L.A. Times and waits until his wife comes home from her early morning power walk and when she returns they sit down and have a big breakfast together.  He then takes a shower and continues reading the L.A. Times until he finishes it all and is ready to go pick up his grandchildren from school.  He then helps his youngest grandchild with her homework until she is finished, dinner is ready, and his daughter gets home from work.  Finally, after dinner he watches T.V., usually the Lakers, as his grandchildren start to pack up and go home.  That has pretty much been his routine everyday for the past fifteen years since his retirement.  Whenever possible, he also likes to visit Las Vegas, partly because the relaxing hotel rooms remind him of the relaxed and easy going life as a kid in Zahle, Beirut. 

I was born on January 21, 1927. When I was a child, I lived in Zahle, a village, about forty miles from Beirut. I lived in Zahle for five years, until I was five years old. I went to Zahle Armenian School. There were other schools in the area too, but my parents thought Zahle Armenian School was the best one. I only learned Armenian in school. The majority of Zahle consisted of Armenian Orthodox and Arabs. Half the Arabs were Christian and the other half Muslim. Zahle is situated in the Becca Valley. It is a valley surrounded by mountains and a river in the middle.

The only way news got around was newspaper and books. There weren’t any televisions or even radios. At the time I was five, you know, so I couldn’t read but people who could read got news from newspapers.   There weren’t many famous people in our town. There were two names that in the future became members of the Lebanese Parliament. Their names were Joseph and John Scuff.

When I was young, all my friends and I were very close and we used to play all day long. We played football (soccer), and marbles. To play marbles there is no rules, you just hit each other. My friends and I used to go to the river side, take off our shoes, and walk in the river, and sometimes we would cut our feet because there was some broken glass in the river that we couldn’t see.

In Zahle there was a festival that they would burn wood and call it the “fire festival” because people would jump over the fires. This is an old pagan tradition that is still continued to this day. When I was young I cannot remember if we celebrated a weeklong festival of wine followed by a flower festival, but I know that when I returned to Zahle in the future we did celebrate it.

In Zahle the most famous foods were Taboule and Hummus. After eating, the elders would then quickly drink Arak.

I have been to many of the cities in Lebanon: Tripoli, Ale, Hamdoon, Zofer, and Becmarie. The other cities were mainly situated in the high mountains while Zahle was in the valley. The life in the village was simpler than life in the city. When I was young and lived in the village it was a simple life, but when we moved to the capital city, it was different and more complicated.

There is no comparison to the life that when we were young in a village, and now in Glendale. Glendale is a city, a more advanced city, while Zahle was just a primitive village with donkeys and everything. We used to walk, while in Glendale everything is with cars and airplanes. 

My school was walking distance from my house. It took five or ten minutes to walk there. In the summer, we did not have school, but in the winter time, it was very cold and sometimes it snowed so bad that we could not leave the house, so we used to stay in the house for several weeks even. We had fun in the house because our parents were with us, and my father used to read a book to us in front of our fireplace.

When I was in Zahle, I had only a sister, my parents, and my grandmother used to live with us. My father was a shoemaker and he had a shoe store and had several employees. He used to make shoes for women and for men. My mother never worked. Most of the town though, was farmers and merchants who owned plantations of grapes, corn and wheat. Because most of our town was next to a river between two hills, we would often go out for a picnic.

There were movie theaters and plays at the time, especially in the summer time, groups used to come from Beirut or from other big cities to perform plays. That was the funniest part in the summer time.

We never had a telephone. I know there was one in the village but people didn’t have any in their houses. To communicate with each other we would go on the roofs of the houses and call each other.  Usually the houses were made with stones, very high ceilings, several rooms with columns, and typical oriental style. 

When I was young, I remember the transportation was mainly carriages, with horses, camels, and donkeys, and we didn’t have cars. Later on, we started seeing cars, but very few. The best transportation was walking. We had outdoor markets where fruits and vegetables were sold. My mother would buy these groceries for the week. They were all very healthy, not like hamburgers and McDonalds.

There was no such thing as a refrigerator. I never saw one when I was young. That’s why everything was bought daily. Everything was cooked at home and sometimes if there was something that we couldn’t completely finish, we would put it in small baskets, and hang it from the ceiling to keep it cool.

There are certain clothes what we use to go and buy, but 90% of whatever we were wearing was prepared by my mother. She used to go and buy some material, come home and sew us pants, shirts, jackets, and sweaters.

There was no such thing as air-conditioning.  Because the houses were built with large stones, usually in the summer time, it would keep really cool, and in winter time, we had a small fireplace to keep us warm. The large stones kept the wind outside and kept the temperature inside at a normal level.

I remember when I was very young in my school, the teacher used to teach me a song about birds. In the roof of the classroom there was a hole and suddenly, when she was teaching us this song, I saw a bird flying in and I thought the teacher knew the bird was going to fly inside and that was why she was teaching me.  It was very amazing, and until this age, I never forget that.

I went back to Zahle even when I became a father. I showed my kids where I grew up and I shared memories with them.

Of course I would like to visit Zahle now, but it is very difficult, you know, we are far away now and it is not very easy to go back.  Especially right now the country is not very secure politically, that’s why we never tried to go back there.

None of my friends still live in Zahle but I do have some cousins who used to live there but now they live in Boston. They sometimes visit me and we share old memories about Zahle. 

I really wish I was young again and I was living in Zahle. I never regret living in Zahle because I have the best memories there. That’s the place I was born and I am very proud of it.

Interviewed by Dveen Babaian