The monastery of St. Elias Shwayya rises like a fortress upon a sandstone cliff in the Matn district, thirty-one kilometres from Beirut. Standing at an altitude of 1150 metres, 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 beautiful 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. 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 decapitating the priests of the Phoenician god Baal, 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.
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 20th July, people from all regions take part in liturgical celebrations held at the monastery.
HISTORY
Archives, inscriptions, and architecture provide and sometimes contradictory information on tne monastery's origin. The oldest document found at monastery is a land-purchase deed dated 1004 in the Islamic calendar, corresponding to 1595-6.
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 barrelvaulted 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 re-founded during the Ottoman period after a long period of abandonment.
St. EIias 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 Abilama* 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.
However, the modem 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 aschool, 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, Easily, 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 inhabi- tants, 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 Oerasimos 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.
