Hello and thank you for downloading witness from the BBC World Service.

Today we go back 60 years to the start of the oldest international arts festival in the Middle East

held in the ancient Roman ruins of Balbeck in Lebanon.

I'm Louisa Dargo, and I've been talking to a woman whose aunt helped organize that

first festival in 1956, and who was herself on the Festival Committee for more than 20 years. It's 1956.

1956 and Lebanon's president Camille Chamoun has had an idea. The president was a former ambassador to London and elsewhere

and he wanted to place Lebanon on the world map. So he decided that he'd been to lots of European festivals. He might as well create one in Lebanon

which would throw people to Balbeck, make a place known, and that's how it happened.

Mona Gerege's aunt, a prominent lawyer from a wealthy family, was one of the people

President Shamoon tasked with organizing the first festival.

Lebanon had only been independent in 1956 for 13 years,

and Balbeck was its most famous Roman ruins,

the ancient city of Heliopolis, with its complex of temples high in the

Becca Valley in the shadow of Mount Lebanon, close to the border with Syria.

Balbek is an absolutely a standing place and according to many of the main orchestra directors in the world, it's the best acoustic in the world.

If you drop a pin you hear it. That's why Balbeck was in the do people because in fact he wanted them to finance the festival since the state had

Veritani budget to devote to this. So in the beginning we had to accept whoever

was kind enough to say yes and then as the festival's reputation grew we were able

finally to pick and choose the best on the world. Within a few short years, the Balbeck International Festival was attracting some of the greatest names in classical and jazz music and in theatre and dance.

Little by little we had Elizabeth Schwartz-Cop, we had Ella Fitzgerald, John Bays, we had Miles Davis, June Anderson,

and all the best orchestras.

We had Carayon with the Berlin Philharmonic and the Royal Ballet with Margot Frontein in 61, and she came back with

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