How Beirut's National Museum Saved Its Collection During the Civil War

During Lebanon's 15-year civil war (1975-1990), the National Museum of Beirut stood almost exactly on the Green Line, the demarcation zone separating the warring factions that split the city in two. There was no realistic chance the building itself would escape damage, and it didn't — snipers, shelling, and flooding all took a toll on both the structure and its archaeological collection over those 15 years.

What makes the museum's story remarkable is what its staff did before the worst of the fighting hit. Led by Lebanon's first director of antiquities, Maurice Chehab, and his wife, curators raced to protect the collection using whatever materials were on hand. Small, portable artifacts were hidden in basement storerooms, which were then walled up and sealed from access entirely. Larger, immovable pieces — including floor mosaics and monumental sarcophagi — were encased directly in concrete, sometimes reinforced with sandbags, essentially entombing priceless Phoenician and Roman antiquities inside protective bunkers built floor by floor, right where they stood in Beirut.

The measures worked, mostly. When the war ended in 1990, the majority of the museum's core collection had survived, though not without cost — the 15 years in an uncontrolled underground environment caused real damage from humidity and salt in the concrete, and looting still scattered some pieces internationally. Restoration took years; the museum's upper floors reopened in 1999, and it wasn't until 2016 that the basement level — including the very concrete casings used to protect the artifacts — opened to the public for the first time.

Walking through Beirut's National Museum today, you can still see fragments of those original concrete protective casings alongside the restored antiquities, a deliberate choice to preserve that history rather than erase it. The museum screens a short documentary in its audiovisual room, on the hour, detailing exactly how curators pulled off the preservation effort under fire.

If you're visiting Beirut, the National Museum is worth treating as more than an archaeology stop — it's also a direct, physical record of how a city's cultural institutions survived a war that lasted a decade and a half, told through the very protective measures its staff improvised to make that survival possible.