I live with the feeling that I once experienced what it was like to go through a time warp. It was many, many years ago. It was early spring and I was in Lalibela, in northern Ethiopia. At that time we were no more than a couple of dozen foreigners among the thousands and thousands of Coptic pilgrims dressed in white robes who had come from all corners of the country to celebrate the Ethiopian Easter. They were slowly marching around churches carved out of rock to the sound of drums. kebrowhile reciting litanies in geez, the oldest of the southern Semitic languages. The flickering of thousands of candles plunged the scene into a theatre of light and shadow. And for a moment, I felt as if I had stepped through a door and stepped into a scene from the New Testament.
Lalibela is in an inaccessible corner of northern Ethiopia, near the border with Eritrea, in the middle of arid, poor and bare mountains that barely turn green during the rainy season. Nearby is a traditional village of round houses. It is one of the largest pilgrimage centres for Coptic Orthodox Christians. And one of those places that you have to visit once in a lifetime. Although now, unfortunately, this whole area of northern Ethiopia is in turmoil due to the armed conflict in Tigray and the uprising of the Amharas and it is not advisable to visit the area.
Between the late 12th and early 13th centuries, a king named Gebre Mesqel Lalibela ordered the construction of several churches to create a new Jerusalem, in response to the fall of real Jerusalem to the Muslims in 1187. But instead of being built upwards, in the traditional manner, they were deconstructed downwards, carving each one into the rock, as if they were a monolith. It is said that another reason for making them this way was so that the armies of Islam that harassed his kingdom would not easily locate them. And the strategy worked for him, because despite the many invasions that the Abyssinian empire suffered in the 16th century led by Imam Ahmadibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi, The Conquerorhis hosts never found these troglodyte churches, so they could not destroy them.
A stroke of luck for future generations, as we can now visit one of the wonders of antiquity. A set of 11 temples distributed in two groups, plus a twelfth separated from these, which were deconstructed with chisels, emptying the rock until achieving an interior volume equal to that which would have been achieved in a classical temple, with a Greek cross plan, columns, capitals, semicircular vaults and altars. Except that everything is made of a single piece.
Bulletin
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RECEIVE THEM
The largest is Bet Medhane Alem, 33 metres long by 25 metres wide and with a lavish decoration reminiscent of Greek temples. Bet Emmanuel, a few hundred metres east of the previous one, is one of the most beautiful and best carved of all, which surely served as a royal chapel. But the most famous, the most photogenic and praised of all is Bet Giyorgis, the church of Saint George. The crowning work of Ethiopian religious architecture, sculpted by the stonemasons of King Lalibela in honour of the patron saint of Ethiopia, who in gratitude for the detail left the footprints of his white horse in the rock. At least that is what the priests who serve Bet Giyorgis say, always immaculate with their gabi yellow in color and its scarf (white turban) while shaking the air with a fly swatter. In any case, they are all recognized on the UNESCO World Heritage List since 1978.
As stated: a return to the origins of Christianity.
Second installment of this summer series in which I remember places whose beauty gave me Stendhal syndrome, a disease of Romanticism that is also frequently diagnosed in modern tourists.
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