Gibran Museum

The Gibran Museum occupies a former Maronite monastery carved into the cliff face above Bcharre, and is the obvious first stop in town. The collection holds around 440 of Khalil Gibran's original paintings and drawings — Symbolist nudes, watercolours, ink sketches — plus his manuscripts, letters and personal effects, including the desk and chair from his Greenwich Village studio.

The building itself is at least as interesting as the contents. The lower rooms are caves cut into the rock, where seventeenth-century monks lived and which now hold Gibran's tomb in a cool, dim grotto. Allow at least an hour, and pay attention to the paintings — Gibran was a serious artist as well as a writer, and the work is much darker and stranger than the gentle prose of The Prophet suggests.

things to do museum
A story
Khalil Gibran died of tuberculosis in New York in 1931 and his body was returned to Bcharre the following year. He had asked to be buried in the Mar Sarkis monastery, the seventh-century rock-cut hermitage above the town where he had spent time as a young man. His sister Marianna eventually bought the building and turned it into the museum that now houses his manuscripts, his oil paintings and the cell where he is buried.