Follow the Bees in Lalibela, Africa's Jerusalem
Text and photographs Albena Shkodrova
Lalibela, in the midst of the high Ethiopian plateau, is Africa's well-hidden Jerusalem
At first it is pitch-dark. I can’t see the crowd before me, but I can sense it – through the sound of steps in the dust, the muted whispers coming from different sides and, from time to time, the clack of wooden walking sticks.
Someone takes my hand. By mistake. They let go. All the people surrounding me are feeling their way around, but they all know where they are headed. I figure I’m almost there when I start stepping on people who are seated on the ground.
The first sign of dawn – the barely visibly greyness on the horizon, suddenly populates the rocks around me with hundreds of silhouettes. A moment later, the priest, somewhere below, begins to sing and they all sway and start howling along in an uneven choir.
Ethiopian prayer is much more reminiscent of the imam’s song than of the chants of other Orthodox Christians, to whose group it actually belongs. The priest performs it with a loudspeaker and his sleepy, unwashed, but loyal, flock follows him any way it can. The mesmerising rumble of this crippled yet enthusiastic choir welcomes the arrival of every new day in Ethiopia.
I’m standing on top of a rock in Lalibela, Africa’s Jerusalem. Had it been created during Antiquity, this place would now be among the world’s wonders. The rock in front of me is hewn, vertically, in such a way as to reveal a giant cross in the middle. Carved out from bottom to top, it has been made into a free-standing stone church, with a few floors carved out within it – a mind-boggling technology, known only in Ethiopia.
Unlike places, such as Petra or Cappadocia, where façades were carved into cliffs or vertical massifs over the ground, here the work is similar to the digging of a fox hole – from the bottom up, and this resulted in many of the sites being underground.
In Lalibela, Abyssinia’s erstwhile capital, 13 such churches have been discovered so far. Archaeologists dream of what the neighbouring hills may house but for now they are busy preserving the known temples – after a series of rough episodes in Ethiopia’s history, they are in urgent need of restoration.
When the sun finally appears, there are a few hundred people standing on the hill over Bete Giyorgis – Lalibela’s most distant temple.
When I descend into it, I come upon a human traffic jam – one group pushes down the steep corridor leading to the entrance, while another one attempts to come out of it. The place where people go past each other is relatively wide but, at the tunnel’s base, there is enough space only for a single pair of feet. In that spot, the pilgrims pass each other like this: one leans against the wall and the other one steps over him while leaning in the opposite direction. All this with hundreds of people breathing down their necks.Not all of Lalibela’s churches are completely detached from the rocks. On some of them, façades are carved out only on one or two sides, while the rest merges into the hill. Their internal layout, often consisting of a series of caves, stems from the needs of the priests and the pilgrims rather than from some architectural logic. Even though the caves’ walls are evened-out like rooms, they are scattered on all possible levels.
The Ethiopians assert that all the churches here were built during the reign of the Abyssinian ruler Lalibela in the twelfth century, and that at least one of them was completed in a single day. This claim is as dubious as the history of Lalibela himself.
Legend has it that he was born as the younger brother of the throne successor. Once, as a young child, an entire swarm of bees surrounded him. His mother interpreted this as an omen that he shall be the next ruler, which naturally did not please his older brother. Lalibela was then expelled from the Kingdom, ending up in Jerusalem.
The official version claims that it is there that the exiled prince had a vision, telling him to build a pilgrim centre in the cliffs of Roha, his home town. The story is unnecessary romanticised. One does not need a vision in order to decide to build his own, hard-to-reach church, after wandering for a few weeks around Jerusalem’s monstrous multitude.
Either way, Lalibela returned, replacing his repentant brother, and created a kind of architecture never seen before (or since).
The 13 known churches make up two separate complexes, while Bete Giyorgis stands on its own. One of the compounds houses the world’s largest stone church – Bet Medhane Alem. Its façade is 11.5 metres tall and it was created under obvious classical influence. Some suppose that it was built as a replica of the oldest church in Africa – Saint Mary of Zion in Axum, which was torn down long ago and replaced by a new construction.
This part also houses the oldest of Lailibela’s temples discovered thus far – Bete Maryam. Entering takes me back a few hours, to the morning’s impenetrable darkness.
After a while, I realise I am not the only one suffering from the sudden light changes. The priest who obligingly shows me the church’s relics for the price of 3 Birrs (around 30 cents), shows up sporting sunglasses – in case I decide to take a picture of him with a flash.Traditionally, the monks here are very sensitive to light. In the middle of the church stands a column on which, locals say, the Ten Commandments are written, as well as the history of the beginning and end of the world – in Greek and in the local Ge'ez language. The column, however, is wrapped in fabric and diligently kept away not only from tourists, but also from explorers. The monks claim that unveiling it is too dangerous, as it emits a powerful light.
The final stroke in this picture is a dark space in the church’s upper floor gallery where, if one has enough time and patience, he can glimpse a pale face. The pilgrims, who are also regular visitors, say that it belongs to a monk who settled there 30 years ago and hasn’t left since. He vowed to hide from people. After so long in the dark, bright light could kill him.
After winding my way through the labyrinth of chapels, followed by my shoe-carrier – a (self-appointed) assistant in the removal, safe-keeping and putting back on of my boots, I come out into the light again. The opening, through which one exits the complex, is also in the shape of a cross.
The path to the rest of the churches is occupied by beggars. Begging is a pandemic in Ethiopia; it is done everywhere, almost by everyone, positively without shame. The exceptions are those belonging to the city’s middle class, the authorities and those who feel close to them (among them ticket sellers and the licensed tour guides). The latter, however, have substituted begging with something even more unpleasant – arrogance.
My guide – an incredibly tall man, whose wide footsteps I can barely keep up with, waves angrily at the women and children seated by the road and they quickly retract their hands, “So many times we tell them not to beg!”
The second group of churches is carved into a terrain that is more uneven. It is a complex labyrinth of long tunnels and sudden chapels in between. Allegedly, one of the tunnels reaches as far as Axum, some 200 kilometres to the north – another of the hard-to-verify Ethiopian legends. Some of the temples, it is supposed, were originally built for secular purposes but they are now fully under the clergy’s control.
Bete Gabriel-Rufael, for example, is surrounded by a five-metre-deep ditch, which makes it reminiscent of a castle, rather than arousing religious humbleness. The royal family’s church of erstwhile is also here – Bete Amanuel, which also refers to the architectural traditions of the Axumite Empire’s ancient capital with its combination of stone and wood.
We pass by tens of hollows in the hewn walls by the churches, all of them appearing to be inhabited. In some, monks are reading prayer books, swaying back and forth monotonously and watching the passengers with unseeing eyes. In others, temporarily abandoned, there are pillows, spoons and even mosquito nets.
Then an awkward scene ensues, in which I scramble with my shoe-carrier, he comes on top, and manages to tie my shoelaces. After leaving the churches, the path leads through the labyrinth of an African monk village – a multitude of hay shacks of every shape and size, surrounding the hundred or so cells dug into the rocks.
If Lalibela’s inhabitants ever had a more affluent life, they left no inheritance of it for today’s generations. The town is one of the dirtiest and probably the poorest in Ethiopia. It stands at the edge of the Tigray desert, where almost a million people starved to death in 1984. The epic road, climbed endlessly, with a speed of 25 kilometres per hour and constant falls into the seasonal streams’ beds, is promising. It winds up towards the imposing peaks of the Lasta Mountains, but when one reaches 2,300 metres, there is no sign he had just entered the legendary Roha of old. If King Lalibela ever really existed, it should be acknowledged that he hid his Jerusalem well.
Visually, but in many other ways too, Lalibela is one of Africa’s hidden treasures. It is certainly a place where only a few outsiders can find their way around in the dark.
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