Great Famine

During the First World War, half of the population in the Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate starved to death. A blockade by the allies, coupled with the Ottoman policy of prioritizing crops and supplies for their troops, meant that vital supplies from the neighboring Bekaa stopped coming in. With the political and man-made causes already plenty, Nature sent a swarm of locusts which over the course of 3 months, annihilated everything edible that was still left.
A century later, Lebanon will finally have a memorial for everyone who died in The Great Famine of 1915 to 1918. The project was spearheaded by USJ’s Professor Christian Taoutel and Lebanese writer Ramzi Toufic Salameh. It’s financed by Banque du Liban, Lebanon’s Central Bank.
The monument is a steel tree, with quotes by prominent Lebanese contemporaries of the famine, such as Gebran Khalil Gebran, Tawfik Yousef Awwad, Anbara Salam Al-Khalidi and others, being the leaves.