About
The convent was founded in the middle of the 19th century. In 1847, the Lebanese Maronite Order received, as a donation from a family in the village, a piece of land on which there was a humble edifice made up of two vaulted rooms. The monks who provided religious services at Saint Romain, the parish church of the village at the time, lived there. They provided, in parallel, between 1854 and 1900, the religious education of the young parishioners, teaching them, for this,
the principles of reading in Arabic and Syriac.
It was a century after the foundation of the convent, in 1948, that the Lebanese Maronite Order, responding to sollicitations from the inhabitants of Hammana, requested and obtained authorization to open a school by decree n˚7000. It was a school for boys, teaching French and Arabic. The history of the seventy years that followed will be that of incessant architectural and educational transformations to accompany the evolution of the century and of language acquisition techniques.
Installed at the beginning in a building rented on the heights of the village, in the district of Chaghour, the school quickly integrates the edifice of the convent, which was arranged and equipped in order to be able to welcome the pupils of the neighboring villages. Father Youhanna Saadé El Ghostaoui, Superior of the Saint Jean-Maron convent of Qobey, was appointed director. In September 1963, the secondary cycle was created by decree n° 669 and the school was transformed into a high school. It will henceforth be known as "College Saint Antoine - Hammana of the Lebanese Maronite Order". In 1971, the school became coeducational.
The architectural history of the buildings testifies to a constant effort to gain covered surfaces that can accommodate students. In 1966, the building was extended. A wing and a second floor were added, the boarding school having at the time some 200 students. Then the building, once again cramped given the number of students, was extended a second time, then a third in 1975, where the dormitories were replaced by classrooms. In the nineties, the church and the convent were restored and enlarged. The most significant works were undoubtedly carried out in 2012 when the large open courtyard of the college was covered, which saved a lot of space but eliminated the graceful arcades which made the charm of the convent's facade and identified it with further than the eye could see.
The convent and the college suffered the brunt of the upheavals of history in the last quarter of the twentieth century. The period of war was fraught with danger and, in 1982, during the sad “mountain war”, the monks lived through long months of trouble, doubt and fear for the future.
The war also brought about major changes in education. After having been a French-speaking college since its foundation, the school set up an English-speaking section in 1985, thus meeting the needs of new students who came after the demographic changes caused by the war, the school operating since then with two sections, French and English speaking. The monks who successively directed the monastery and the college were committed both to maintaining the buildings and to adapting to the evolution of teaching tools and techniques. The 2000s saw the implementation of a school project that met the needs and objectives of the college, and the first role it gave itself, namely to train in citizenship. The computer rooms, audio-visual, C.D.I., and the science laboratory were refurbished and re-equipped. A “twinning” agreement between Hammana and the French city of Mâcon, the birthplace of the French poet Lamartine who spoke in unforgettable pages of the Valley of Hammana, allowed to give an international dimension to the French-speaking branch whose students participate in the festival "Poetry in my city", in Mâcon. A state-of-the-art language laboratory was set up in 2014 to actively involve students in their learning. At the beginning of the 2019-2020 year, the direction of the College reacted to the effect of the successive social crises which had sparse the ranks of the students. Helped financially and morally by the Hammaniote emigration, and imposing strict monitoring of the students despite the difficult conditions of confinement, she managed to instill a new dynamic at the College which is, once again, becoming a place full of life.
