Custodian of the Émile Hannouche Museum
Since 5 August 2022 the Lebanese Maronite Order has entrusted the foundation with managing and preserving the Émile Hannouche Museum in the Bekaa, to be kept open to everyone free of charge.
What the agreement says
The Order owns the museum and its collection. The foundation manages the museum, preserves the collection, and restores the place as a cultural and artistic space for meeting and exchange among Lebanese and non-Lebanese alike.
The foundation covers the running costs during its term and is authorised to approach institutional donors, companies and public authorities on the museum's behalf.
The collection
Émile Hannouche, who died in 2019, brought together paintings, icons, Japanese engravings and archaeological and architectural pieces. The icons from his collection are the ones conserved at the USEK Museum with Bulgarian Development Aid.
The foundation has documented selected objects to professional standard, with scale and colour references, as the basis for conservation funding applications. Those applications are still open; no restoration grant for the museum building or its paintings has been awarded yet.
Next phase: digitisation by youth with physical disabilities
The whole collection, some 1,300 paintings alongside the icons and objects, still has to be digitised and catalogued. In its funding proposals for the museum the foundation has committed to entrusting this work to young people with physical disabilities from the Zahle district: ten training sessions in collection photography and cataloguing for twenty trainees, a digitisation station (camera, tripods, scanner) installed at their centre, and paid work on the museum's collection and the foundation's later projects once certified.
The programme is designed and costed but not yet funded. It builds on the team's earlier work in disability inclusion with Youth for Peace, and on a safeguarding policy that already covers vulnerable adults. The foundation is looking for a partner whose mission is the inclusion of persons with disabilities to carry it out.
Sources: Memorandum of understanding between the Lebanese Maronite Order and the Lebanese Heritage Foundation, 5 August 2022 (signed scan); collection documentation photographs; concept notes for the museum submitted to the Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation (2023) and Hungary Helps; LHF safeguarding policy.
Icon of Pentecost 
Icon of the Virgin and Child 
Mountain landscape with a monastery 
Village landscape 
Coastal landscape 
Carved stone relief