Battered Holiday Inn hotel in Beirut set for new lease of life
Battered Holiday Inn to be auctioned off 34 years after end of brutal Lebanese civil war
A symbol of Lebanon's golden age but also its brutal civil war, the empty shell of the Holiday Inn hotel in Beirut could now take on a new life.
No one yet knows what it will become, but after decades as a chilling reminder of the 1975-1990 conflict, the building is set to be auctioned off in the coming months.
Towering over the Beirut seafront, the Holiday Inn is instantly recognisable because of the bullet and rocket marks still covering its walls, more than two decades after the war that devastated Lebanon.
It survived the so-called "battle of the hotels", one of the civil war's earliest and most violent confrontations, pitting Christian militias against Palestinian fighters allied with Lebanese Muslims and leftists.
One of the most iconic images to emerge from the war, taken just as Beirut was being torn apart into east and west, showed a tower of black smoke rising above the building.
The Holiday Inn, which had opened for business a bare two years before the conflict broke out, featured prominently in Circle of Deceit, Volker Schloendorff's vivid 1982 film about a war correspondent who sets up shop in the hotel while reporting on the raging civil conflict.
It never returned to being a hotel, and has instead loomed silently above a fast-changing city populated by memories of a dark past and dreams of a dazzling future.