> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://beirutwire.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Two Forgotten Palaces: The Mansions That Remember Zokak el-Blat’s Golden Age - URL: https://beirutwire.com/two-forgotten-palaces-the-mansions-that-remember-zokak-el-blats-golden-age/ - Published: 2026-10-11T06:29:44.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-11T06:29:44.000Z - Description: A few steps apart in Zokak el-Blat stand two fading nineteenth-century mansions: Ziade Palace and Heneine Palace, better known to many Beirutis as Dahesh Palace. - Author: Beirut Wire - Tags: Culture Walk along Hussein Beyhum and Abdel-Kader streets in Zokak el-Blat and two buildings interrupt the modern Beirut surrounding them. One is the Ziade Palace, a large sandstone mansion with stacked arcades, balconies and the remains of gardens that once looked toward a far less crowded city. Nearby stands Heneine Palace, also widely known as Dahesh Palace. Its exterior is comparatively restrained. Behind it survives one of Beirut’s more unusual nineteenth-century interiors: arches, fountains, geometric plasterwork and rooms that passed through the hands of landowners, diplomats, doctors and one of Lebanon’s strangest twentieth-century cultural figures. They are often described simply as abandoned palaces. Together, they tell something larger: how Beirut escaped its old walls, how Zokak el-Blat became a district of villas, schools and intellectual life, and how much of that city has since disappeared. Academic research on Zokak el-Blat identifies the nineteenth century as the formative period of the quarter. As Beirut expanded rapidly beyond its historic core, wealthy families began constructing detached residences amid gardens on the hills southwest of the old city. The neighborhood simultaneously emerged as an important educational and intellectual center associated with figures of the Nahda, including Boutros Boustany, Nasif and Ibrahim al-Yaziji and Hussein Beyhum. Ziade Palace belongs to the earlier phase of that transformation. Architectural research generally dates it to around 1860\. Later documentation identifies an Italian architect whose name is rendered as “Altina,” although the identity of the original commissioner has not been securely established. By about 1870, the property belonged to Youssef Nasr, a merchant reported to have made his fortune in England. The house remained associated with the Nasr family for decades before Joseph and Louis Ziade purchased it around 1930. The building itself preserves an unusually clear picture of elite suburban life in nineteenth-century Beirut. It rises on a vaulted sandstone base, partly designed to negotiate the sloping terrain, with two principal residential floors above. Each was organized around a central hall opening through a three-arched arcade toward the north. Balconies, tall windows, circular openings, sandstone masonry and a Marseille-tiled roof gave the mansion the combination of local planning and imported detail characteristic of Beirut’s evolving bourgeois architecture. Two distinctive rooftop structures once provided shaded, ventilated spaces above the house. Around it were several gardens, service buildings, storage spaces and what documentation identifies as a bakehouse, chicken coop and firewood area. Nineteenth-century maps show the residence at what was then effectively the western edge of developed Zokak el-Blat, looking toward gardens, Qantari and the sandy expanses leading toward Ras Beirut. The Ziade name brought another layer of history. Joseph Ziade was a physician and Louis Ziade a lawyer, and their extended family included the celebrated writer May Ziadeh. Her connection to the mansion, however, has often been confused in later retellings. Joseph Ziade travelled to Egypt in 1936 and brought May to Lebanon during the severe personal and psychological crisis that followed the deaths of several people closest to her. On May 16, 1936, she was admitted to the Lebanon Hospital for Mental and Nervous Disorders, commonly known as Asfouriyeh. Her confinement and subsequent attempts by relatives to have her declared legally incompetent became one of the most painful episodes of her life. Beirut’s Court of First Instance ultimately dismissed the incompetency case in June 1938, and she returned to Cairo in January 1939. Later heritage accounts have variously associated May with Ziade Palace and neighboring Heneine Palace, but the surviving evidence does not securely establish that she resided in either mansion. What is certain is that her ordeal in Lebanon became closely entangled with members of the Ziade family. The neighboring Heneine Palace has an even more complicated biography. Sources disagree on its precise construction date, generally placing it in the second half of the nineteenth century. The World Monuments Fund says the residence was originally built for a Russian nobleman. Other accounts identify its first owner as a Polish aristocrat from lands then within the Russian Empire, with his name appearing in different forms in later sources. The precise identity therefore remains uncertain. The Mezher family, major local landowners, subsequently became associated with the property. In the early twentieth century, the palace was rented to the French physician Justin Calmette, who taught at Saint Joseph University’s Faculty of Medicine. Heritage accounts place him there from around 1903 until the outbreak of the First World War. Then the mansion became diplomatic space. Beginning around 1914, it housed the United States Consulate-General, which remained associated with the property until 1936\. The Netherlands consulate also occupied part of the building for a period around the First World War. These uses alone reveal how Zokak el-Blat had changed from a semi-rural suburb into one of Beirut’s prestigious addresses. Architecturally, Heneine is almost the reverse of Ziade. Its street façade gives relatively little away. Inside, however, heritage documentation describes fountains, geometric stucco ornament, elaborate arcades, muqarnas and decoration drawing on Moorish, Mamluk and other Islamic revival influences. The result belongs to the eclectic architectural culture of late Ottoman Beirut, when local traditions mixed freely with European and wider regional styles. Beginning in the 1940s, part of the palace was rented by Salim Moussa Achi, better known as Dr. Dahesh, the writer, art collector and founder of Daheshism. His association became so strong that many Beirutis still call the building Dahesh Palace. His collection of nineteenth-century European academic art would later become closely associated with the Dahesh Museum of Art in New York. The palace was not his property, however, an important distinction sometimes lost in popular retellings. Its decline accelerated after the death of Marie Mezher-Heneine in 1970. When war began in 1975, displaced families occupied parts of the building and subdivided some of its large rooms with temporary walls. The palace survived the Civil War, but the decades that followed left it increasingly vulnerable to deterioration, complicated ownership and development pressure. Ziade Palace followed a different path. The Ziades continued using the property until around the outbreak of the Civil War. Sources describe it subsequently being looted and occupied during the conflict, leaving the building damaged and its sandstone façades scarred. By then, the landscape that had made both houses possible had largely vanished. Gardens became building plots. Streets widened. Apartment towers rose around surviving villas. The social geography of Zokak el-Blat changed dramatically during and after the war. Academic research has documented both the demographic transformation of the quarter and the disappearance of large numbers of its older buildings. The two palaces nevertheless survived. On June 9, 2010, Culture Minister Salim Wardeh signed Decision No. 56 placing the parcels containing Ziade and Heneine palaces on Lebanon’s General Inventory of Historic Buildings. The designation recognized their architectural and urban significance and restricted alterations without approval from the Directorate General of Antiquities. Heneine was subsequently selected for the 2016 World Monuments Watch because of its deterioration, fragmented ownership and the development pressures surrounding it. Its inclusion helped generate exhibitions, tours and heritage campaigns aimed at drawing public attention to the building. Protection, however, has not resulted in comprehensive restoration. Heneine has undergone limited conservation, cleaning and stabilization efforts connected to heritage initiatives, but no publicly documented comprehensive rehabilitation of either mansion could be identified. Ziade likewise remains a protected but deteriorating private property. Their precise present ownership structures are not transparently documented in readily accessible official records. That uncertainty is part of their significance. Beirut has saved some historic houses through museums, private restoration or institutional reuse. Many others disappeared because the land underneath them became more valuable than the buildings themselves. Heritage advocates have repeatedly warned of the dramatic decline in the number of surviving historic structures across the capital. Ziade and Heneine therefore survive almost as a pair. Stand between them today and the surrounding city makes their original setting difficult to imagine. But the houses still contain the evidence. The gardens reduced to fragments. The sandstone. The arcades. The diplomatic rooms. The central halls. The traces of families who moved through them. They are not simply two ruins left behind by the Civil War. They are two surviving pieces of the moment when Beirut was becoming a modern city, and when Zokak el-Blat stood near the center of that transformation.