It has expanded to Tripoli in Lebanon, the country where I live, and Tripoli in Poland (“Trójmiasto”) where I come from. The Libyan Tripoli, ancient Phoenician Oea, dates back to the 7th century BC. Over the centuries, Greeks, Romans, Spanish, Ottomans, Italians, as well as the over forty year long Qaddafi regime and the turbulent years following the 2011 revolution left their traces in the city's
fabric. Tripoli in Lebanon was a settlement already in 1400 BCE. The Phoenicians, Persians, Greeks, Romans and dynasties of Umayyads and Fatimids, Crusaders, Mamluks, Ottomans and French rolled the land till 1943 when the Lebanese independence came. The second biggest city in Lebanon Tripoli hosts mosaic of confessions and ethnicities living there. The Lebanese Tripoli is also called as Ṭarābulus al-Sham or Levantine Tripoli to distinguish it from the Libyan Tripoli, located also on the Medetereanean Sea, referred to as Tripoli-of-the-West (Tarābulus al-Gharb). Then the Polish Tripoli is an agglomeration encompassing three independent cities Gdańsk, Sopot and Gdynia. The oldest and the most prominent of them, a millenium-old Gdańsk, has a complex history with interwoven periods of Polish, Prussian and German rulers but also times of autonomy. Part of the 14th - 15th century Hansaetic League Gdansk was one of the main ports on the Baltic Sea. Disputed region between Poland and Germany it went under he control of the League of Nations in the interwar period just to become a symbolic place where the WWII broke out in 1939. In the 1980s, Gdańsk was the birthplace of the Solidarity movement, which played critical role on the collapse of communism in Europe. The Tripoli Triptych
If you look on the map you will see thet each of the cities lies on a different continent and if you could draw a line from North African Libya Tripoli, through the Lebanese Tripoli, on the Asian continent Middle East, just to reach the Polish Trójmiasto in the north of Europe and then went back to Libya, you’d have a huge triangle covering vast areas of the Mediterranean and Europe. This area has, in particular in the recent decade, been sliced by countless migrant routes of millions of desperate people looking for security and better life in Europe. The three cities have become then even closer symbolically connected through these refugees/migration waves. Yet the refugees’ crisis has only exacerbated the sense of mistrust, misconceptions and distance, all of it particularly visible in Poland. Hence the Tripoli Triptych aims at putting photos stories from these three cities together in one symbolic triptych presentation with a hope that it will help to learn, to understand and to appreciate each other across the Tripolis’ triangle.
