alibela is a great little town to visit. Its complex of churches chiselled from pink volcanic rock have been called the “eighth wonder of the world”. In addition, the wonderful year-round climate and exhilarating mountain views, combined with some of the finest lodgings outside of the capital, are reason to spend a few days soaking up the fine vistas. Lalibela’s relative isolation and small size means you will get to understand more intimately and thoroughly the innate piety and hard lives of the rural poor.
To the north of Lalibela, Dewosach, where much of the decorating and illumination of holy books was done in the time of King Lalibela, rises more than another 1,000 m (3,280 ft) above Lalibela to 3,670 m (12,040 ft) while the much nearer and slightly lower Asheten with its distinctive flat top lies to the east. Asheten means smell in Amharic and this mesa was named during the reign of King Lalibela’s nephew, King Neakutoleab, who burned frankincense while building Saint Mary’s church on its summit – visiting monks said they found it by following the smell.
This is not to say that everything in the garden is rosy. Women here bear an unfair workload, and you may wince when you see little girls of five and six bent double and almost hidden from view by the immense load of firewood on their backs while their elder brothers play outside table tennis. Sanitation and public cleanliness is a bit haphazard so there are more flies here than in Tigray to the north.
To the south of the north-west complex of churches you can still see some older dwellings built in the style peculiar to Lalibela, neat round two storey dwellings built out of stone with conical, thatched roofs, but most other buildings are either wattle and daub structures or improvised buildings with corrugated roofs patched with thatch. There could hardly be more of a contrast with the ancient craftsmanship of the ecclesiastical buildings – which must surely be unique in all the world for having been built from the top down rather than from the ground up.
Guides in Ethiopia are licensed in different ways for different areas and sites by the Ethiopian government. The guides for the rock hewn churches are specialised-licensed for the 11 churches. The federally licensed tour guides can operate all around Ethiopia but cannot take you into the churches in Lalibela town.
History
Since the town, first called Roha, was founded by the eponymous King Gebre Mesqel Lalibela of the Zagwe dynasty more than 900 years ago as the “new Jerusalem”, the later-renamed Lalibela has been a major ecclesiastical centre of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and a place of pilgrimage to its amazing concentration of rock-hewn churches. Pious Ethiopians often walk hundreds of kilometres in bare feet from all over Ethiopia to receive blessings.
Although all the church exteriors and interiors are carved from soft volcanic tufa, their architecture is extremely diverse: some stand as isolated monoliths in deep pits, while others have been cut into the face of a cliff. Establishing a sequence or chronology for a rock-hewn building is much more difficult than for a conventional one, especially when the churches in Lalibela are all in daily use for services. Consequently, there have been long running academic disputes as to both the time period and duration of construction.
The Ethiopian Orthodox tradition unequivocally recognises the huge task represented by the cutting of these churches and their associated trenches, passages and tunnels. It explains the completion of the excavation during the reign of a single saintly king by attributing much of the work to angels who, after the workmen had downed tools for the day, came in on a night shift and worked twice as fast as the human day shift had done. In this way, work proceeded so fast that all the churches are said to have been completed within King Lalibela’s quarter-century rule.
Some argue that the oldest of the rock-hewn features at Lalibela may date to the 7th or 8th centuries CE – about 500 years earlier than the traditional dating. These first monuments were not built as churches, although they were later extended in a different architectural style and converted to ecclesiastical use. Later – perhaps around the 12th or 11th century – the finest and most sophisticated churches were added, carved as three- or five-aisled basilicas and retaining many architectural features derived from those of ancient Aksum, which had flourished some 400–800 years previously. It is the last phase of Lalibela’s development which may, Phillipson believes, be dated to the reign of King Lalibela. The complex of churches was extended and elaborated. Several of the features attributed to this last phase bear names like the Tomb of Adam or the Church of Golgotha, which mirror those of places visited by pilgrims to Jerusalem and its environs. This naming has extended to natural features: the seasonal river which flows though the site is known as Yordanos (Jordan) and a nearby hill is Debra Zeit (Mount of Olives). It seems that it was King Lalibela who gave the place its present complexity and form: a substitute for Jerusalem as a place of pilgrimage. It may be significant that early in King Lalibela’s reign the Muslim Salah-ad-Din (Saladin) had captured Jerusalem, and for this reason Ethiopians may have felt excluded from making their traditional pilgrimage to the Holy Land across the Red Sea. Today, a cloth-draped feature in the Church of Golgotha is pointed out as the Tomb of King Lalibela.
