STAYING POWER
RESILIENCE IS A ROMANTIC WORD The adversity has been considerable. The museum opened in 2013 as Obama and Hollande were threatening strikes on Syria; the inauguration was nearly cancelled. Then came elections, protests, the October 2019 uprising, COVID, the August 2020 port explosion— which blew the entrance door off its hinges, though the collection inside was untouched— and the subsequent wars.
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Resilience is a romantic word in Lebanon, we have had one crisis after another, ongoing.
His calmness is notable— not stoic in a performed sense, but the calm of someone who has simply stopped expecting anything different. Murex’ s revenues are external, denominated in dollars, which insulated the company from Lebanon’ s financial collapse. mim’ s visitors contribute almost nothing to operational costs— donations average $ 1 per person, the shop nets $ 40,000 to $ 50,000 a year— but the annual deficit of approximately $ 500,000, which Eddé covers personally, remained manageable.“ The museum is free. That helps, especially with schools. And 2024 was our best year.” On the Night of Museums in 2025— suspended since 2019— the mim welcomed 7,500 people in four hours.
None of this is sustainable in perpetuity on a single person’ s will. Eddé is clear-eyed about this. Succession planning remains unresolved. Lebanon offers no obvious legal framework for the kind of endowment or charitable trust that might exist in France or the United States. He has consulted lawyers. Nothing obvious has emerged.“ One day I will become a mineral as well. And it would be a pity if everything stopped.”
Beyond financial planning, he holds a conviction that is perhaps more powerful than any legal structure: that people love this place, and that what it gives them is irreplaceable.“ In Lebanon, we don’ t have a lot of things that inspire students. I think what is here is the best way to illustrate chemistry, physics, mathematics— things they don’ t always like at school. The true thing.”
A MESSAGE TO COLLECTORS The Arab world is not short of extraordinary private collections— antiquities, Islamic art, contemporary Arab painting, jewelry, manuscripts— assembled over lifetimes with extraordinary knowledge and resources, seen by almost nobody. Some are preserved with great care. Others are in danger.
Eddé makes the practical case plainly.“ When the pieces were in boxes at home, it was a nightmare— open and close, open and close. Here, at least I can come and visit them. And people discover and enjoy them.”
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The best way to take advantage of a collection is to share it. Keeping it like Scrooge in your basement is sad. Who is going to see it?
He is not naive about the challenges. Lebanon has no tax incentives equivalent to the American 501( c)( 3). There is no culture of naming wings after donors, no foundation ecosystem, no established pipeline from collector to institution.“ We don’ t have a culture of museums in Lebanon.” In Paris alone, there are 700 museums. The Louvre attracts 10 million visitors a year. The gap is not one of wealth— it is one of imagination, of precedent, of institutional habit.
The mim represents one answer to that gap: not the grandest possible answer, but a real and functioning one. A single person with a passion, a clear philosophy, and the willingness to absorb the cost of his own conviction— building something that has outlasted multiple crises and still, in its best years, draws 45,000 people into the underground of a Beirut university to look at rocks.
In Fifty Years …
Near the end of our conversation, we ask Eddé to finish a sentence:“ In fifty years, I want mim to be remembered as the place that …” He does not hesitate.“... that shows at its best the beauty of our nature that is not very well known. Having a museum with crocodiles or elephants is one thing. Having a museum with things that constitute our planet and are hidden most of the time— and are of incredible beauty— is something else. We don’ t see them. The fact that they are here is wonderful.”
There are about 5,000 known minerals that constitute our entire planet. The mim has assembled 560 of them— 10 % of all known species— in visible, carefully illuminated specimens from 75 countries. It is not the biggest collection in the world. But it may be the most generously shared.
That ugly first piece of cassiterite, number one in the catalogue, tells a story that began 4,500 years ago when the Phoenicians extracted tin from the mines of Cornwall and smelted it with Cypriot copper to produce bronze— the alloy on which the first great civilizations of this region were built. Salim Eddé keeps it on display not as a trophy but as a reminder: that even the most ordinary-looking thing carries a world inside it, if someone chooses to look closely enough— and generously enough— to share what they find.
ABOUT THE MUSEUM mim, the Mineral Museum, is located on the Innovation and Sports Campus of Saint Joseph University in Beirut. It houses 2,400 minerals from 75 countries and 170 Lebanese fossils, including the one-of-a-kind Mimodactylus libanensis— known affectionately as Mimo.
The museum is free and open Tuesday through Sunday.
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