Between 12 am and three:30 am Sunday evening, somebody went into the church of Saint Jean-Marc in Byblos, Lebanon, and proceeded to utterly destroy the inside.
The hardly 20 sqm (200 sqft) church all the time remained open and accessible to everybody. Nothing was reported stolen.
The person suspected of the assault was caught and given to police and navy intelligence.
He was initially unidentifiable as he wasn’t carrying any papers however was later reported by the locals on the scene as a Syrian nationwide.
The locals who caught him reportedly suspected there could also be others however checked the whole space and didn’t discover anybody else.
They reported that he was “sitting calmly” exterior. They discovered the pews lined up exterior “in a bizarre method” and the Christmas decorations and nativity destroyed. In addition to a statue of Saint Charbel on the sidewalk.
The altar was additionally utterly damaged.
Historical past
Eglise Saint Jean-Marc is a Romanesque cathedral situated in Byblos (Jbeil), the oldest constantly inhabited metropolis on the planet.
It was based by Saint Jean-Marc, the patron saint of the city, who’s believed to have established the primary Christian group in Byblos.
The church was in-built 1115 by the Crusaders. It has undergone a number of renovations over time resulting from earthquakes, invasions, and different disasters.
In 1764, Emir Youssef Chehab of the Druze dynasty donated the church to the Lebanese Maronite Order, which restored and reopened it in 1776.
The church was additional broken by British bombardments in 1840, however has since been restored and continues to serve the Maronite Christian group.
One attention-grabbing characteristic of the church is its open-air domed baptistery, which dates again to its authentic building in 1115.
The church is situated on Rue de Port, between the port and the archaeological space.
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