Founded in 1716, and celebrating the holiday of its intercessor on August 31.
This monastery is located on a hill North West Zakrit, oversees the valley of Nahr El Kalb from Jeita Grotto to the river city, and this hill is known as the Al Moushammar hill, and historians return it to the Aramaic word “Mshamar”, which means “the sad guardian”, while some others ascribe it to a word that means in Syriac the watchful, and this brings us back to the fact that the place since the fifth century AD was a center for the “crying trapped” who were sent from Aleppo to Lebanon by Semaan Al Amoudi. And “Al Mashamar” which means the guard place that existed previously in the Southern end of the hill where the guards warn the heads of the Wassan temple that the monastery was built on its ruins, about the presence of enemies and the approach of their danger, so they slaughter children as offerings to the Gods, or put what they owned from gem stones in children clothing and threw them in front of God to ward off the danger. This tradition has continued with the visitors of the cave beneath the church of the monastery to the present day where we see a lot of ordinary stones wrapped with a small piece of fabric and dumped at the altar of the cave, and it’s a tradition that no Christianity tried it or knew about it elsewhere. The hill Al Moushammar continued to be a guarding center by monks since the construction of the monastery where a cement hut was held and visited by priests for rest and prayer, if not for guarding only.
The engineering that the monastery was built on its basis shows that the church is very old and it was built over an old Wassan building. The Patriarch Astfan Doueihy reminds in his book “History of the times” that Saint Abda church was renovated on a hill overlooking Nahr El Kalb in year 1685 on a land owned by Al Moufarrej of Beit Shabab that decided to make it the monastery church and helped build it in year 1716. This monastery and its church belonged to Saint Kannoubin monastery, the Patriarchal, and based on the request of Archbishop Yahkoub Awed, the monastery was handed over to the Antonine Monasticism emerged back then, This was at the era of the Pastor Atallah Kreker Al Shababi.