Orosdi-Back: A lost Beyrouth department store from an elegant age

My mother told me it was located on ‘Banks Street’ in Down Town Beirut, the road that leads up to Riad el Solh Square. On most maps the street is also named after Riad el Solh. The store was located opposite Bank Intra, or so I was told. Presumably the location of the store was indicative of the high end goodies on sale inside. The closest comparison to Orosdi Back is the old Allied’s department store in Dubai, for those who remember Dubai in the 1980s. But Orosdi Back was a store from a different age, an age of elegance as opposed to the vulgar modern excesses of the nouveau-riche, something Beirut’s Down Town is synonymous with!

A wonderful blog dubbed ‘language hat’ published some information about the founders of this chain of department stores. According to the blog the chain of stores came about as a result of a partnership between Adolf Orosdi, a Hungarian army officer and his sons who opened a clothing store in Galata in 1855, and the Back family, who were Austro-Hungarian Jews as was Orosdi. They established a chain of stores across the east. Three years after their first store in Vienna, Leon Orosdi and Hermann Back opened a store in Egypt in 1896.

The blog described the Cairo store thus:

“Some older Cairenes may still remember Orosdi-Back, that famous turn-of-the-century department store which early on added the Turkish-derived a.k.a "Omar Effendi" to its name. The six-story rococo department store designed in 1905-6 by Raoul Brandon (1878-1941) stands at the corner of (Sultan) Abdelaziz and Rushdi Pasha Streets, a powerful architectural testimonial to the Cairo that was. In its better days when it was still a private sector company the globe above the building was seen for kilometers away as it shone its powerful beam each night beckoning wide-eyed patrons.”

The store had branches apparently in Istanbul, Baghdad, Aleppo, Tunis, Smyrna, Salonica and Beirut. Precious little is available online about the store or about the treasures this ‘Harrods of the East’ held within its resplendent precincts, but one postcard from ‘the really old days’ of Beirut shows the store on Rue de la Douane, Beyrouth. The building, along with so many historical landmarks of Beirut, is probably long gone now or remodeled beyond all recognition.

The Beirut Down Town today is a private park for politicians and their wealthy patrons, in the absence of visitors from the Gulf. The streets that once buzzed with so much commerce are missing a vital ingredient: a sense of purpose and a clearly defined function. The down town seems to be a disconnected city center, it is no longer the national market place, no longer a corporate base, it is reduced to showcase status.