Church of Mar Elias Btina in Beirut (Lebanon) and its wall paintings. Conservation project report

In 2007, renovation work in the Greek-Orthodox Church of Mar Elias Btina in Beirut resulted in the discovery of some wall painting fragments. They were fully uncovered and preserved in 2010 and 2011 by conservators from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in cooperation with archaeologists from the PCMA UW. The wall paintings, dated provisionally to the 12th–13th century, was an almost complete decoration of the presbytery walls, which included depictions of the Prophet Elijah and a number of unidentified saints. This discovery significantly enriches the corpus of St Elijah’s representations in the medieval art of the Christian East and opens new avenues of discussion regarding church art of Beirut in the Crusader period.