CCulture & Heritage

Celebrate Nowruz, reclaim the coast

byHabib Battah
Mar 20, 2015

As is custom, the Persian holiday of Nowruz will be celebrated tomorrow on the rocky coast of Dalieh in Beirut. The photo above is from a couple of years ago, before the area was fenced off by property developers who purchased the land, through a series of controversial legal maneuvers.

However many in Lebanon’s Kurdish community will be coming out tomorrow throughout the day and the organizers of the #SaveDalieh campaign will be holding a bonfire at 5PM to celebrate with them and demand the space be kept free and open to the public. You can join the Facebook event here.

For more on how developers managed to seize the last strip of raw coastline in Beirut and the city’s only major free and open space that allows such community gatherings, see my in-depth piece this week in The Guardian.

You can also visit the campaign’s page to find out more about how they are resisting the project. We had a great time at the last Nowruz celebration, which was full of dancing and singing for the whole family. See more pictures here.

Habib Battah

Habib Battah is an investigative journalist and founder of the news site beirutreport.com. Battah has covered Lebanon and the Middle East for over 15 years and teaches journalism and media studies at the American University of Beirut. He is a contributor to Monocle, The Guardian, BBC World, Al Jazeera and others, a former fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University and two-time recipient of the Samir Kassir Press Freedom Award. Battah's investigative work was recently recognized for outstanding local reporting by the Columbia University Oakes Award for Environmental Reporting. Battah earned a B.A. in Journalism from the University of Texas at Austin and an M.A. in Near East Studies and Journalism from New York University.

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Who Am I?

Habib Battah is an investigative journalist and founder of the news site beirutreport.com. Battah has covered Lebanon and the Middle East for over 15 years and teaches journalism and media studies at the American University of Beirut. He is a contributor to Monocle, The Guardian, BBC World, Al Jazeera and others, a former fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University and two-time recipient of the Samir Kassir Press Freedom Award. Battah's investigative work was recently recognized for outstanding local reporting by the Columbia University Oakes Award for Environmental Reporting. Battah earned a B.A. in Journalism from the University of Texas at Austin and an M.A. in Near East Studies and Journalism from New York University.