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The impact of the Beirut port blasts has been very destructive to this patrimony. On 4 August 2020, shelves and cupboards were thrown down on to the earth, documents, registers, and files were mixed with stones, sand and broken glass from the windows. Following an urgent intervention during which archives were collected, stored in boxes, and safely moved to the convent of St. Mary in Beirut, UNESCO provided technical assistance to archive and digitize the valuable items. This initiative was made possible with the generous financial support of the Qatar National Library within the overall project “Support to Archives and Libraries in Lebanon with their collections safeguarding”. In particular, this activity focused on the recovery and protection of damaged archives to conserve, restore, document and digitalize their collections following the Beirut Port explosions.

“These documents include correspondences between patriarchs, citizens families and monasteries, and they can reveal a lot about life in Beirut and Lebanon in the 19th century, said Souad Slim, director of the Institute of History and Heritage at the University of Balamand and contracted by UNESCO to supervise the digitalization process. These archives are very important for all inhabitants of Beirut to keep the memory of their history: demographic history, through baptisms, marriages and deaths registers, social history from annual reports of charitable associations and institutions, economic history from tax registers, exemptions from military draft, and other key societal matters of that time.”

Following the completion of the project, the Director of the UNESCO Multisectoral Regional Office in Beirut, Costanza Farina, and George Awad, National Program Officer for Communication and Information at UNESCO Beirut, were received today by His Eminence Elias Audi, Metropolitan bishop of the Greek Orthodox Church of Antioch for the Archdiocese of Beirut, with whom they shared the results accomplished. His Eminence Elias Audi praised the efforts undertaken by UNESCO to safeguard the history of Beirut. “UNESCO believes in the universal power of documentary heritage, and the need to preserve the memory of Beirut, said Costanza Farina. The archives build bridges between generations and connect the citizens of the city. As soon as the archives were made accessible to the public, several students and researchers have consulted and studied them and more scholars will benefit in the future, which represent an added value of the activity.”

Li Beirut is an international flagship initiative launched from Beirut by the Director-General of UNESCO, Audrey Azoulay, in the aftermath of the explosions, on August 27, 2020, to support the rehabilitation of schools, historic heritage buildings, museums, galleries and the creative industry, all of which suffered significant damage in the deadly explosions.