Aaliya's Books was a beloved bookshop, cafe and community hub that hugged one side of Gourard Street in Gemmayze, a fashionable, bohemian neighbourhood in Beirut near the city's port.
On August 4, 2020, the Beirut blast came crashing through the front of Aaliya's, shattering the glass and nearly caving the roof in.
As a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, Aaliya's was closed at the time. The only people inside were co-owner Niamh and a friend. When the explosion tore through Beirut, Niamh was knocked unconscious when a 20kg sign hit her on one side and a door hit her on the other.
“On a normal Tuesday evening in the summer in August, we could have had 30 or 40 people sat outside there. And, if we did, we could have 20 people dead,” says William Dobson, the co-owner of Aaliya’s.
In the days before the fifth anniversary of the Beirut explosion, the piercing summer sun bounces off the rebuilt exterior windows of Aaliya's. The inside has been rebuilt, refurbished and upgraded, the bottles that shattered in the 2020 explosion replaced.
But there are no customers inside and the doors are locked.
The 2020 explosion was just one of a succession of crises that befell Aaliya's that ultimately became too much to bear and saw it permanently close after one final week of fanfare in December 2024.
The blast was just one of many, almost constant, negative events that made surviving in the chaos no longer an option.
It was indicative of the succession of disasters that have befallen small, locally-run businesses in Lebanon as they try to fight against an almost unending current of problems that means that any form of certainty is impossible.
Perhaps a business could recover from a single devastating event, such as the blast. But that explosion came during an economic crisis – that saw costs soar and people's purchasing power evaporate – and during the pandemic.
Mr Dobson, the co-owner of Aaliya’s, which opened in 2016, could tell you roughly the financial cost of the 2020 explosion. “It’s obviously a significant amount of money lost, but what was lost was the confidence in building a bigger longer term business.”
But the greater cost was much deeper: “People lost hope,” he said.
“Even post-explosion and post-recovery, what you end up losing is ambition, an ambition that was lost not just in terms of the people who were working for us and saw less of a future for themselves,” he said from Beirut, days ahead of the fifth anniversary of the port explosion that killed more than 220 people and shattered the city.
“But also I think for us we felt less ambitious in what we were able to achieve and we felt less confident in the thing that we were doing.”
Fresh space
Aaliya’s was set up in 2016 to be something new, a fresh space that allowed people to talk and expresses themselves, “not driven by profit but driven by value”.
Its nightly events were legendary, from the musical performances, speakers, book readings, dancing and much more. When anti-government protests broke out in the autumn of 2019 – which at the time were full of hope that a new Lebanon could be ushering its way in – they were often centred in the nearby Martyr's Square that sits adjacent to Gemmayze.
As a result, Aaliya's was often the place where many of those reports were filed to news desks around the world. Mr Dobson talks of as many as 300 customers a day at one point.
But then any optimism over the nationwide protest and potential change quickly subsided as the extent of the economic crisis, one of the worst in modern history, became so starkly apparent.
And from a financial perspective, the biggest hit was not from the blast but the economic crisis.
Economic woes
Mr Dobson recalls having to deal with a succession of dizzying, ever-changing exchange rates. Even at the times when things did look up, the constant power cuts, challenges of importing books and the soaring price of fuel were just some of the almost constant headaches.
Even as the pandemic persisted and businesses had to close, the footfall fell but overheads did not. Aaliya's was insistent that it would keep paying its staff, in keeping with the business it sought to be.
Mr Dobson said he wanted the bookshop to be somewhere where people could thrive; they could “start off a busboy and become a manager”.
“When you’re trying to do something and you think you’re making a difference and you see the differences that you are making. You’re seeing people read, you’re seeing people coming to story telling nights,” he said, giving the example of the some 300 people who came when Aaliya’s first opened to a story telling night by a collective called Cliffhangers.
“It was kind of indicative of something more compelling that there was a yearning for spaces like this in the city and a specific moment in time.”
“And that became harder to justify after the explosion because it almost felt like what’s the [point] in making micro-improvements when you can see every single one of those improvements disintegrate both literally and figuratively in the space of 30 seconds.”
“It becomes very hard to wake up every day, continue to go to work, to invest where you might need to invest, to renovate, to spend money – because you have to spend money sometimes in a business. But suddenly the idea of spending money became anathema to us because what are we going to do, spend money and see it disappear in another explosion?”
“When you’re trying to building something sustainable and long term, after the explosion the idea of doing sort of because almost impossible to comprehend because what are you doing to do, build something long term and see it destroyed?”.
Headaches continue
Aaliya's did reopen after months of rebuilding in the wake of the Beirut blast. But the headaches did not stop coming. The economic crisis was still rearing its head, power cuts were regular and energy inflation was running at 3,000 per cent at one point.
“So in some ways the explosion, it was one event. And it was a horrific event and traumatic. It traumatised the population and I don't think anyone here has recovered from it, I'm not sure they’ll ever recover from it. But also I think on some level it allows one to forgot about what was also going on at the time, which economically was far harder to deal with," Mr Dobson said.
Things picked up again throughout 2022 and moving into 2023.
“And then October 7 happened... in some ways a hammer blow,” Mr Dobson says of the day in 2023 when the war in Gaza broke out, which ultimately would engulf Lebanon and see Israel invade and declare all out war last year.
There was talk with an investor, not just one with capital, but the experience to help a functioning business to drive it forward and could help with things like the back office, social media and accounting. But they turned their attention elsewhere as another crisis was inflicted on Lebanon.
“Something like the explosion, what it does from a sentimental persecutive makes Lebanon not seem like the place that you want to invest in,” Mr Dobson said.
“And then you get to that point when maybe some of that sentiment is starting to shift and people may be looking slightly different because you know it’s been three years since then … you’re seeing those grassshoots of some form of recovery.
“And then October 7 happens and you're sitting on the verge of not just a countrywide war but even potentially a regionally war. You don’t invest, you don’t invest in Lebanon.”
