Beirut's once-thriving cultural community was already at breaking point. Then the blast hit

At the moment that one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history blasted outwards from Beirut's port and swept across the city, Zeina Arida, the director of Sursock Museum, was standing outside her office with two colleagues. The force of the explosion, less than a mile away, threw them into the museum's stairwell, as all around them windows shattered and glass and debris rained down. "We have escaped by a miracle," Arida said over the phone three days later. "The museum is blown away, very simply... There is no door, no window, no glass left in the building."

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