Lalibela

Last weekend, Robin and I skipped the feeding center (yep! With permission, but still …) and took the 7:00 a.m. flight from Addis Ababa to Lalibela in Northern Ethiopia. Tom and Sara from the Ehtiopian Skateboard Park Project had recommended it as a “must see”; we scored $130 RT plane tix from Ethiopia Airlines (they were $340 at kayak.com!), talked to a local travel agent to get a hotel (with a shower, please, and a toilet that flushes), and we were off!

     A little background is useful here: Lalibela is Ethiopia’s second holiest “city” (pop. 14,600) to Aksum and is a pilgrimage destination for much of the country. HOW THE HECK people get there is beyond me, but pilgrims are tenacious, we all know that. King Lalibela ruled in the late 12^th/early 13^th centuries. Our guide Teddy explained that he went into exile due to the hostility of his uncle and his brother king and was almost poisoned to death by his half-sister. During this period, Lalibela is said to have seen Jerusalem in a vision and was told by God to build a new Jerusalem as his capital in response to the capture of old Jerusalem by Muslims in 1187. Consequently, the place is laid out like Jerusalem, the river is called Jordan, etc.

     There are 11 churches (I know, Wiki says 13 … I was there and paid 300 birr and had a guide who is a deacon in the church and he says there are 11) … and these churches are carved out of ROCK … like, as in: “Hey, that’s a really big rock you’re standing on, what if we started carving straight down with these 12^th century tools and build full-blow, 2- and 3-story churches with naves and baptismal pools and stuff?” and then the guy next to him says, “Yeah, that’d be pretty cool, but how would we get water in the baptismal pools?” and the first guy says, “Duh, it’s the 12^th century, we’ll just exploit the artesian geological system that brings water uphill.”
     Yeah, I know!

Thousands of pilgrims flock here every year to worship; how they get there is beyond me, but we all know how tenacious pilgrims can be.

Regretfully, the government recently decided to put these hideous canopies over most of the churches to protect them from erosion; apparently they're a vast improvement from the previous canopies, which obscured more of the view. Still, I took this because it helps to envision how the landscape had originally appear and how far down they carved out the monolithic structures.

Carved to resemble wood, but still all one piece.

Dead people (3 of them): they came, worshipped, stayed, worshipped to death. Common, but some people got to be put into the crypts in the side walls of the churches. In the 1950s, most bodies were exhumed but somehow these guys got to stay.

Inside a church. Still all from the same rock; no other rock piled, stacked, added ... carved with unfathomable foresight.

This is the most famous of the churches, with good reason.

The churches has been in continual use since the 12th and 13the centuries (Ethiopian Orthodox); priests and monks hold services in all of the churches.

Teddy picked us up at the airport ... close enough.