Becharre is home to a museum dedicated to the writer whose seminal work, The Prophet, published in the United States in 1923, has since been translated into 115 languages and is considered to be one of the major works of the 20th century.
During an evening of readings from The Prophet,organised recently as part of the Beirut Book Fair, writer Alexandre Najjar recalled that in the 1960s the book was adopted by "the hippy movement", notably for its famous line: "Your children are not your children (...) they come through you and not from you".
To mark the Prophet's centenary, the museum took part in an exhibition at the UN headquarters in New York in April. Today, the museum is exhibiting 23 paintings, with reference to the year 2023, representing people who played an important role in the writing of "The Prophet", such as the author's mother.
Photo: Partial view of the tomb of the Lebanese-American writer and poet at the Gebran Khalil Gebran Museum in Becharre. Photo Joseph Eid/AFP.