The Patriarchal Monastery of Saint Elias – Shwayya (or Deir Mar Elias Shwayya; ) is a stauropegic monastery of the Greek Orthodox Church of Antioch, perched atop a sandstone cliff in the Matn District, thirty-one kilometers from Beirut.
Standing at an altitude of 1150 meters, it overlooks the resort towns of Bikfaya, Khinshara, and Shwayr, and a string of small mountainside villages such as Zighrine, Shwayya, Ayn Teffaha, Shrine, and Jouar. The entire region is covered with lush pine forests, and the area surrounding the monastery is unusually diverse in flora, with oak, eucalyptus, willow, and maple trees, orchards of apples, pears, prunes, and peaches, and vines terraced on the slopes.
The stones of the monastery are hewn from the cliff, and, from a distance, the monastery dissolves into its background, seeming to rise beyond the cliff as a natural continuation. Elias or Elijah, the Old Testament prophet, is a Christian saint also venerated by Muslims and especially the Druze. Together with St. George and St. Michael, he forms a trinity of military saints to whom several churches and monasteries in Lebanon are dedicated. As defender of the true faith, he did not hesitate to use force in slitting the throats of the priests of the Canaanite god Ba'al, worshipped by the king of Israel, Ahab, and his wife Jezebel. Even though he is an Old Testament figure, Elias is regarded as an example of the monastic life because of his long residence in the wilderness, during which he was fed by ravens. The Greek Orthodox monastery lies next to a Maronite monastery also dedicated to Elias, which belongs to the Mariamite (previously Aleppine) order.Monasteries of Antiochian Orthodox Patriarchate, University of Balamand Publications, 2007.
The monastery is a summer residence of the patriarchate, and meetings of the Holy Antiochian Synod are regularly held there. St. Elias Shwayya also remains a popular place of pilgrimage. On the saint's feast day of July 20, people from all regions take part in liturgical celebrations held at the monastery.
History
Archives, inscriptions, and architecture provide sketchy and sometimes contradictory information on the monastery's origin. The oldest document found at the monastery is a land-purchase deed dated 1004 in the Islamic calendar, corresponding to 1595–1596.
In his history of Bikfaya, Edmond Blaybel states that the Greek Orthodox monastery of St. Elias Shwayya was built in 1612 on a plot of land belonging to the priest Boutros al-Klink, who also granted the new monastery lands in the domains of Abou Mizane and Zighrine.
However, there is architectural evidence of an older foundation date in the monastic basement, which includes six cells joined by small doorways and two larger rooms that probably served as a twin-nave church. The rooms are hewn from the cliff and completed on the open side by a barrel-vaulted roof and thick wall, a form known from both the early Christian (fifth-sixth centuries) and the Crusader period (twelfth-thirteenth centuries). In either case, then, it seems that the monastery of St. Elias, like most Orthodox monasteries, was refounded during the Ottoman period after a long period of abandonment.
St. Elias Shwayya suffered from the schism of 1724. The monastery was granted to Greek Catholics and Greek Orthodox, depending on which community paid more revenues to the local Druze Abillama‘ emirs. In 1728, the Russian traveler Barsky reported the presence of five monks at St. Elias Shwayya. A document published by the historian Asad Rustom records that the Greek Orthodox finally recovered the monastery in 1749, when Yunis Nicolas al-Jbayli paid 1500 piastres to the emirs Isma‘il and Hassan Abillama‘. Yunis entrusted the monastery to Orthodox monks and the Abilama‘ emirs undertook to protect them and hear their grievances. It is a typical document revealing the precarious status of waqf lands during this period. The endowment of monasteries in this manner was frequent, being a convenient way of increasing agricultural production and tax revenues.Monasteries of Antiochian Orthodox Patriarchate, University of Balamand Publications, 2007.
However, the modern history of St. Elias Shwayya may be said to begin in 1760, when it was rebuilt after a severe earthquake by a Beiruti notable, Yunis Nicolas al-Jbayli and the superior Sophronios al-Sayqali. A commemorative inscription over the church's north door records this event. Despite chronic political and clan rivalries in Mount Lebanon, St. Elias Shwayya prospered during the later eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century. It received the deposits of rich Greek Orthodox merchants from Beirut and the Biqa‘, and it loaned funds to peasant freeholders and sharecroppers of the region. Several agricultural domains were acquired and the monastery gained more waqf land in neighboring Abou-Mizane and Qinnabeh near Broumana. St. Elias Shwayya also became an important centre of silk production.
Throughout this period, the monastery's prosperity depended largely on good relations between monastic superiors and local notables. For example, Makarios, superior from 1833 to 1872, was an ally and friend of Emir Haydar Abilama‘, whose wife and children he sheltered when Haydar was exiled by the Egyptian government in 1840. When the Ottoman regime was restored in 1845, Mount Lebanon was divided into Druze and Christian districts and Haydar became governor of the Christian district. About this time, the monastery contained eight monks and eight servants, and its prosperity is indicated by the building of more cells in 1841. The English traveler David Urquhart visited St Elias Shwayya in 1850 and reported that the monastery had profited from a good silk harvest and a new building was to be constructed beside the church.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the monastery established a school, which employed teachers of renown. Primary schools were later maintained at Qinnabeh and Abou-Mizane for the children of its local sharecroppers.
A strong Russian influence developed at St. Elias Shwayya from the later nineteenth century. Russian consuls donated grants to the school, and, both before and after the establishment of the Russian Imperial Palestine Society, Russian orientalists and diplomats such as Barsky, Basily, Krymsky, and Krachkovsky stayed for varying periods at St. Elias Shwayya. Russian monks came to stay when the Patriarch Gregory IV (Haddad) returned from Russia in 1910. They resided for nearly five years and made several additions and alterations to the monastery. Their simplicity and piety gained them the sympathy of the local inhabitants, but they were forced to leave when Turkey declared war against Russia in 1915.
Patriarch Gregory IV undertook the building of a road connecting the monastery to the village of Shwayr and the highway. He paid great attention to the monastery's agricultural production and its peasant sharecroppers. In 1906, for example, he advised the superior Gerasimos al-Dimashqi to build new houses for the sharecroppers of Abou-Mizane, and he planted twelve thousand mulberry trees on the monastic lands.
During the first half of the twentieth century, the monastic school continued to function. Some bishops completed their primary studies there before moving on to Balamand. During the Lebanese civil war, the monastery was seriously damaged by artillery fire, but the superior undertook meticulous repairs, which were completed in 1996.
Architecture
The entire monastery is built of yellow orchre stone from the cliff-side and its architecture reveals four different styles.
Medieval basement
The basement contains two barrel-vaulted rooms separated by arcades and illuminated by a tiny window. They resemble twin-nave churches found in North Lebanon, and they probably formed the old monastic church. Adjacent to them are six barrel-vaulted cells abutting against the rock of the cliff. Their narrow embrasure-like entrances are cut into a wall up to ninety centimeters in thickness. These cells are arranged in diminishing size from east to west. The communicating doorways also become progressively smaller, so that the visitor must eventually bend down to pass through. Such features suggest a gradual initiation into a monastic life centred upon contemplation and prayer. These cells are comparable to the oldest cells in the monastery of Saydnaya in Syria. The first cell holds the coffin of Makarios Sadaqa, bishop of Beirut at the end of the nineteenth century, whose body is still well preserved.
No inscription exists to date the basement complex, but it probably goes back to the thirteenth century at least. The rooms were long used as storage cellars and stables, but they are all now empty. An iron-grilled door separates them from a staircase leading up to the ground floor.Monasteries of Antiochian Orthodox Patriarchate, University of Balamand Publications, 2007.
Ground-floor constructions
These include the church, cells, and reception room built around two small interior courtyards, the whole ensemble being built by Yunis Nicolas al-Jbayli in 1760. It is reached through a main entrance corridor leading from an outer terrace with a fine mountain view.
The first courtyard is triangular. It is bounded by the south wall of the church and by a series of eleven barrel-vaulted cells fronted by a simple arcade. Only slightly larger than the basement cells, these cells have large windows and a massive outer wall. The local inhabitants gather in this courtyard on Sundays and feast days to ring the bell above the Arabic-style church door. This was probably the door of the original church, destroyed by earthquake in 1759. A plaque commemorates the reconstruction, its Arabic letters carrying a symbolic numerical value that gives the date April 4, 1760. The door and inscription are surmounted by a lintel engraved with religious motifs.
The second courtyard is joined to the first by three steps. Narrower than the first, it is surrounded by the west façade of the church, the reception room, and a corridor connecting the church with the building constructed by the Russian monks at the start of the twentieth century.
The church door in the middle of the west façade is fronted by a porch similar in its decoration to those in the houses of Dayr al-Qamar and Bayt ad-Din. The decorative elements found here were probably introduced from Italy after Mount Lebanon was opened to Western trade. Otherwise, however, the church is remarkable for its simplicity. Two windows in the north wall allow but feeble light to enter. Despite the church's small size, the ribbed vault of the ceiling gives a feeling of spaciousness. The arcs of the vault join to form an eight-branched star adorned in the centre by a beautiful flower.
The walnut iconostasis was finely carved by Greek artisans at the beginning of the twentieth century. The royal gate is flanked by the figures of the twelve disciples and surmounted by a relief representing an elephant, pigeons, two-headed angels symbolizing the two natures of Christ or three heads symbolizing the Holy Trinity, and the lamb symbolizing the sacrifice of Christ. Reliefs in the center of the lower register illustrate the Annunciation, the beheading of St. John the Baptist, the Nativity, and St. Elias executing the priests of Ba'al. All these reliefs correspond in subject to the icons above them. Vegetal motifs interweave throughout the iconostasis.