The Grand Hotel Sawfar entrance retains its majesty despite the years and wars. (Credit: Michele Aoun)
It's the kind of institution whose name invokes a load of legends, faces, moments, tastes and smells, visual details, memories and whispered secrets, some more mythical than others.
All those who have known the Grand Sawfar Hotel have a story linked to this establishment, whether it was the children who experienced their first falls from their bikes there, or their parents who prolonged the night around the gaming tables in its casino or its iconic Monkey Bar. Even fallen today, the hotel preserves in the crevices of its skeletal body all of its cult character.
The hotel's legacy has remained because it belongs to the collective memory. Also, Lebanese and people from all over the Middle East who spent their summers there left bits and pieces of their personal and family histories there, regarding the establishment as their summer home.
Somewhere between a national treasure and the jewel box of the Lebanese and Arab bourgeoisie, the Grand Sawfar Hotel is home to an era in Lebanon. Its history began under the Ottoman Empire and extended through the famine of the early 20th century and the years of the French Mandate, to the supposed "golden age" of the 1960s and 70s. In this sense, it still invokes the ghost of a certain past Lebanon.
Roderick Cochrane in front of the mythical façade of Sawfar's Grand Hotel. (Credit: Michele Aoun)
Luxury without name
In 1892, under the Ottoman Empire, the Grand Sawfar Hotel was founded by Alfred Sursock. It was the first establishment in this category to be inaugurated in the Aley district and doubled as a casino, since it was also the first in the country to be granted an operating license for games of chance.
“It was, in fact, the first casino in the country,” said Roderick Cochrane, son of Yvonne Sursock, grandson of Alfred and current co-owner of the establishment (on equal terms with his cousins, Linda Sursock's granddaughters) since 2014.
Roderick Cochrane, son of Yvonne Sursock, grandson of Alfred, and current owner of the establishment since 2014. (Credit: Michele Aoun)
The Grand Sawfar Hotel was built on 32,000 square meters of land, a stone's throw from the Ain Sawfar train station, through which city dwellers and tourists from surrounding countries began to flock as soon as it opens.
“Strangely enough, I only knew the hotel from afar, from the house where we used to spend our summers [Donna Maria Sursock's castle]. But what I remember most is the mythical aura it has always had,” continued Cochrane. The hotel had a mythical feel to it because the families who summered there booked their rooms year after year, and the waiting lists for a bed were endless.
“At the beginning of June, it was a big clean-up to refresh and prepare the hotel. At the end of the month, the Lebanese from Beirut and elsewhere would wrap their apartments and houses in mothball covers, taking with them some of their most important objects, sometimes even carpets, and occupying the establishment until October, when it would close until the following summer,” recounted the owner, who refers to himself the "guardian" of "this iconic property."
Spanning four floors, the 75 rooms were spread out on either side of a staircase that embodied an idea of majesty. “The most luxurious [rooms] were located on the second floor, each with its own bathroom. Those on the second floor, which were narrower, also had their own private bathrooms, but on the third floor, the upstairs bathrooms had to be shared, before more were added in the 1950s,” explained Cochrane. “But we mustn't imagine that it was one of those grand palaces of our fantasies. It was an idea of rudimentary luxury, of discreet elegance, something ostentatious but unassuming," he added.
However, residents and passers-by of the Grand Sawfar Hotel remember the imposing crystal chandelier in the lobby, which was polished at the start of the season, the ochre terracotta tiles that were waxed daily, the legendary Monkey Bar with its wafting cigarettes and the woody smell of whisky, as well as the cinema, the function rooms and the iconic games room.
“It took 370 people — at least three employees per room — to run this huge machine,” Cochrane pointed out. Legend has it that the hotel had its own dry cleaners, that it chartered Boy, a hairdresser who set up shop opposite the gaming room. It is said that the hotel employed a dozen shoe-shiners who came to officiate at the establishment during the summer season, and in the early 20th century, horse-drawn carriages belonging to the Grand Hotel were mobilized to bring remedies from Bhamdoun's pharmacy in case of emergencies.
Walls that tell a story. (Credit: Michele Aoun)
The embodiment of a summer lifestyle
Behind its impressive facade punctuated by blonde stone and its devouring garden that seems to spill out on all sides, Chef Georges al-Rayess ran the operation behind the scenes as early as 1935, particularly the kitchen. “We ate very well, that I remember,” confirmed Cochrane. Other hotel regulars recalled by heart the texture of the chocolate cake, the crispness of the kellage or the smell of the rose syrups served on silver trays in the afternoon on one of the terraces suspended on the edge of the valley.
We could make an inventory of the personalities who have stayed there for a night or a summer. We could mention the great writer Amine al-Rihani, who arrived on the train whose tracks ran alongside the hotel, only to be turned away for lack of a reservation. We could also mention the French soldiers who took refuge here during the Second World War, for whom central heating was installed.
We could even go back to the Arab League, which met here in 1947. We could also mention Umm Kulthum, Asmahan, Mohammad Abdel Wahab, Samia Gamal, Farid al-Atrash and Leila Mrad and their short-lived stays at Sawfar. However, the Lebanese haute bourgeoisie, Philippe Takla, Camille Chamoun, Pierre and Raymond Eddé and others stayed for longer at the hotel. This is in addition to the customers who fled the hot summers of Egypt, Syria and Iraq to come and wrap themselves in Sawfar's padded coolness throughout the season.
What the Grand Hotel represents, however, beyond these names and faces is the landscape of a certain Lebanese and Middle Eastern society of successive eras. More specifically, it embodies the summer lifestyle of this privileged social class, borrowing its habits from the various Western powers that dominated or colonized the region at the time. Rounds of tennis on a fog-shrouded court at the end of the day, trictrac under the oak trees, shaken by the song of the elytra, all were part of the lifestyle at the hotel. Tournaments of bridge, bezique and rummy (known as “quatorze” in Lebanon) were bustling in the game room where the men put down their panamas and the women their fans every day, surrounded by an armada of waiters in starched suits.
Games of chance in the casino came at the end of the night, where the smell of cognac mingled with that of cigarettes. There were film screenings in the cinema, the annual fireworks display on Aug. 15, adulteries tied in knots in the Monkey Bar and black-tie and long-dress balls hosted by the hotel's residents in the reception rooms with their crimson drapes.
Close your eyes and you're reminded of Titanic, Great Gatsby and Grand Budapest Hotel, but with those rolled “r ”s and that lilting accent that only Lebanon has the secret to.
A chandelier remains from the hotel's glamorous days. (Credit: Michele Aoun)
Majesty and decadence
As with every article in this column, at some point the Lebanese Civil War interrupted the story. In this case, the tale of the Grand Sawfar Hotel, and the life of this privileged class that was all about celebration, was abruptly halted. As early as 1976, the Syrian army seized the site, occupying it until shortly before its withdrawal in 2005.
“It has to be said that the hotel was already tired by then, but that didn't stop them from stealing and vandalizing everything: The roof parts were completely demolished, the timber was dismantled and used for heating, and the interior staircases collapsed under the weight of the 12 generators that were thrown around in an attempt to steal them. When you consider that these were the headquarters of the occupying army, you can't imagine the atrocities that must have taken place there,” lamented Cochrane, who has refused to set foot in the hotel even after returning from Ireland in 1996.
Yet, he confided in 2014, “when I saw that the family was exploring the idea of selling the property, I told myself that I had to make it survive, even if it was financially difficult for me to completely refurbish it.” From that point on, Cochrane took charge of the establishment he had inherited, renting it out for weddings and other events. He invited artist Tom Young in 2018 to reinvest the premises for an exhibition of his canvases where he titillated the hotel's ghosts through his brushstroke. “I do it simply because I know it's worthwhile,” he confided.
Apart from these ephemeral moments, the Grand Sawfar Hotel today is the specter of what it once was, with that strange feeling of being both emptied of its past and totally charged by its memory and recollections. “The dream would be to find an investor who believes in its potential and, above all, its importance on the scale of national history, to eventually turn it into a recovery clinic,” said Cochrane.
At the turn of a staircase that has survived many storms and violence, under a vault where a molding mark still remains like lace, along a corridor where one wonders how traces of mosaics are still there, or in front of rounded bay windows where honey-colored light filters, even without having known the Grand Sawfar Hotel, one can still in thought recompose a whole part of Lebanon's shattered history.
This article was originally published in L'Orient-Le Jour.
