Project update - Balamand Abbey, Lebanon

Continuing the presentation of the landmark located photographed during the OCEANUS expedition in Anfeh Lebanon, with a selection of images from Balamand Abbey.

Balamand derives from the French Belmont. The name given by twelfth-century Cistercian monks to their first monastery in the Levant, founded on a hill three hundred meters above sea-level, overlooking the coastal plain sixteen kilometers southeast of Tripoli and eighty kilometers north of Beirut. Since 1603, the site has been the center of an Antiochian Greek Orthodox monastery dedicated to the Virgin Mary and to St George. It remains a place of prayer and contemplation, but since the 1970s, Balamand has become a complex of religious and educational institutions. These include the secondary school of Our Lady of Balamand, the St John of Damascus Institute of Theology, and the University of Balamand, founded in 1988, of which the Institute has become a part.