The University of Balamand (UOB; Arabic: جامعة البلمند‎) is a private, Greek Orthodox university located at El-Koura, Lebanon. It was founded by the Orthodox Patriarch Ignatius IV of Antioch in 1988. The university's main campus is adjacent to Balamand Monastery, but it has two other campuses in Beirut: One is in Sin el Fil, which houses the majority of the faculty for fine arts, and the other is neighbouring Saint George Hospital in Achrafieh, which houses the faculty for medicine and medical sciences. Formerly, it was a project at the Koura District, which North Lebanon’s department came to continue as an inter-cultural message in 1988, and to fuse under its administration the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts (ALBA) and Saint John of Damascus Institute of Theology. The University of Balamand was founded by the Patriarch through the concept of a Kouranian engineer called Elias Abi Shaheen, in which the concept formed between years 1983 and 1987, in the midst of the Lebanese Civil War. The project started soon after Governmental Clearance in 1988. As of 2010, the Master Plan at the mount of long heritage in the Balamand region, is still incomplete.