Saadé Family
[1] They notably own two vineyards, Domaine de Bargylus in Syria and Château Marsyas in Lebanon, and have kept their production ongoing despite the chronic instability facing the Middle East.
[3] Their cousin Angèle Ibrahim married the brother of former prime minister of Syria Fares al-Khoury, grandfather of the Syrian poet and writer Colette Khoury.
According to some sources, the Saadé family famously treated with respect and acted fairly towards peasants working on its lands, unlike many other feudal landowners.
[11] One of his family enterprises, Gabriel Saadé & fils, is mentioned as having opened one of the first cotton ginning stations in Syria in the 1920s by attaching it to its modern olive oil mill facility.
It was reported in the 1916 edition of the Commonwealth Shipping Committee publication that the “[tobacco] industry received considerable impetus this year from the preparation of Latakia blend from Messrs Saadé of Larnaca…”.
[18][19][20][21] Toufick’s nephew, Chafic Saadé, worked with one of the oldest British tobacco brokers Clagett, Brachi & Co for the sale of his yearly production.
Edouard Saadé – or his son Emile – is mentioned among the administrators and shareholders of the Société des Asphaltes et Pétroles de Lattaquié, a French company based in Paris.
[25] He will also prove his pioneering spirit in recruiting Italian engineers and propose to the then-Syrian president Husni al-Za'im the construction of a modern port in Latakia.
[27] It is worth noting that the Saadé family also owned the “Régie des Tabacs et Tombacs” in Latakia which held the commercial monopoly of the highly-praised tobacco produced in the area.
[32] The latter is the nephew of Baron Selim de Nauphal (1828-1902) who was state councilor and professor at the institute of oriental languages of the ministry of foreign affairs of Tsarist Russia.
[43] His maternal grandfather Christophe Catzeflis, scion of a family of Greek descent who allegedly descended from the Palaiologos of Constantinople,[44] was consul of various European powers among which Austria-Hungary, Denmark and Sweden-Norway.
[45][6] The beauty of his wife “Lady Jane” was praised by many travelers and diplomats among which Frederick Arthur Neale who went so as to translate in English one of the poems dedicated to her in his “Eight years in Syria, Palestine and Asia Minor from 1842 to 1850” published in 1851.
The latter is the daughter of Louis Ziadé (1890-1968), who graduated from the Lille law faculty[48] and was elected 7 times in a row president of the Aleppo Bar association in Syria where he lived for 25 years before returning to Lebanon to become member of the Lebanese parliament.
His paternal grandmother was the daughter of Youssef Allam, one of the leading silk traders of Mount-Lebanon in the 19th century and whose activities extended to Egypt and the Syrian hinterland.
[84] Several members of the Saadé family were active within the Orthodox community of Latakia and made various donations to the Patriarchate of Antioch in the last two centuries.
[86][5][14] The creation of both vineyards took place in 1997 when Johnny Saadé and his two sons Karim and Sandro founded Domaine de Bargylus in Syria and Château Marsyas[87] in the Beqaa valley in Lebanon.
