Lalibela Rock-Hewn Churches Guide

1. What Lalibela Is

Lalibela is a town in the Ethiopian highlands, in the Lasta district of the Amhara Region, where eleven Christian churches were cut downward out of solid volcanic rock rather than built up out of blocks. Each church is a single piece of the hillside with the surrounding stone taken away, so the walls, the roof, the columns, the arches and the sanctuary all belong to the bedrock they stand on. The churches have been in continuous liturgical use by the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, and priests still open them, chant in them and celebrate in them.

The site sits at roughly two and a half thousand metres above sea level on a mountain ridge, and the rock is a soft reddish volcanic stone that can be worked with iron hand tools and then hardens on exposure. The eleven churches are grouped in three clusters. A northern group of five stands around a large court. A south-eastern group of five stands across a channel cut in the rock that carries the name Yordanos, the Jordan. Biete Ghiorgis, the House of Saint George, stands apart to the south-west in a pit of its own, cut in the shape of a cross.

UNESCO inscribed the rock-hewn churches of Lalibela on the World Heritage List in 1978, in the first group of sites ever inscribed. The inscription treats the eleven churches as a single monument, and the World Heritage Centre describes the complex as remaining a place of pilgrimage and devotion rather than a museum.

The 1978 inscription date and the description of the site as an active place of pilgrimage follow the UNESCO World Heritage Centre's published entry for the Rock-Hewn Churches, Lalibela. This page gives no visitor figures, because no count published for the site is independently verifiable.

Why the churches look strange in photographs

Photographs of Lalibela confuse people because there is nothing to compare against. A conventional church rises above its surroundings and is seen from below. A rock-hewn church at Lalibela sits with its roof at or near ground level, so the viewer looks down onto the top of a building and only then understands that the ground around it has been quarried away to a depth of ten metres or more. The trench walls are the sides of the excavation, and the church in the middle is what the workmen chose to leave standing.

What is inside them

Inside, a Lalibela church has the elements any Ethiopian Orthodox church has: an outer ambulatory, a middle space for communicants, and an inner sanctuary, the maqdas, screened by curtains and entered only by priests, holding the tabot. The floors are worn smooth by bare feet, since shoes come off at the door. The columns are unlike quarried columns because they were never lifted into place. They were left behind by masons cutting away the stone around them.

2. King Lalibela and the Zagwe Kings

The churches take their name from Gebre Meskel Lalibela, a king of the Zagwe dynasty who reigned around the turn of the thirteenth century and whom the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church venerates as a saint with a feast of his own. The town was called Roha before it took his name. The Zagwe ruled from the Lasta highlands after the decline of the older Aksumite kingdom in the north, and they governed a Christian state whose church traced its faith to the fourth century.

Ethiopian Christianity is old. The Book of Acts records the baptism of an Ethiopian court official on the road to Gaza (Acts 8:26-40), and the kingdom of Aksum accepted Christianity under King Ezana in the fourth century, with Frumentius consecrated as its first bishop by Athanasius of Alexandria. That link to Alexandria set the pattern for the next sixteen centuries: the head of the Ethiopian church was a bishop sent from the Coptic patriarchate in Egypt. Lalibela's churches were cut by a church that was already ancient and already had its own liturgical language, Ge'ez, and its own chant.

The hagiographical account

The Ge'ez life of Saint Lalibela, written down some generations after his reign, tells the story the guides at the site still tell. The infant Lalibela was surrounded by a swarm of bees, which his mother read as a sign of kingship, and the name is glossed as meaning that the bees recognised his sovereignty. He was poisoned by a rival, lay as though dead for three days, and was carried in that state to heaven, where he was shown the churches he was to make. On waking he was told to build them, and angels are said to have worked alongside the masons, cutting by night what men had cut by day.

Hagiography is a theological genre with its own conventions, and the Church that produced this life was making a claim about the origin and the authority of the site rather than filing an engineering report. The historical core the text preserves is a royal building programme of unusual ambition, carried out by a king who was remembered afterwards as a saint and whose tomb the community at Lalibela still shows.

Where he is said to be buried

Tradition places the tomb of King Lalibela at Biete Golgotha in the northern group, and the church is shown as such. Tradition also credits Meskel Kebra, his wife, with the foundation of Biete Abba Libanos, said to have been cut in a single night with angelic help. Both attributions come from the local tradition rather than from a dated inscription, and this page reports them as tradition.

3. Why the Town Was Laid Out as a New Jerusalem

Lalibela was laid out to reproduce the holy places of Jerusalem in Ethiopian rock, so that a pilgrim who could not cross the Red Sea and the desert could still walk the sites of the Lord's passion. The names on the ground make the intention explicit. A watercourse cut through the site is called Yordanos, the Jordan. One church is Biete Golgotha, the House of Golgotha, where John places the crucifixion (John 19:17). One is Biete Lehem, Bethlehem. A hill above the northern group is called Debre Sina, Mount Sinai, and another rise carries the name of the Mount of Olives.

The reason a copy was needed is political and geographical. Jerusalem had fallen to Saladin in 1187, and Ethiopian Christians had long made the journey there at real cost and real risk. A ruler who set out a Jerusalem in his own highlands gave his people the pattern of the holy city without the journey. The idea was not unique to Ethiopia. Copies of the Holy Sepulchre were built across medieval Europe for the same reason, and this site links to the guide on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem for the original those copies point back to.

The topography as catechesis

Walking the site teaches the gospel in order. A pilgrim descends into the trench, passes through a tunnel in the dark, comes out at Golgotha, and returns to the light. The Ethiopian tradition reads that passage as death and resurrection, and the physical experience of it, in a cold trench, barefoot, with chant coming out of a doorway, is the point of the arrangement. The shape of the ground is doing the teaching here, which is unusual among Christian sites.

Ethiopia in Scripture

The naming of Lalibela sits inside a longer Ethiopian reading of Scripture. The Psalms speak of Ethiopia stretching out her hands to God (Psalm 68:31), and Zephaniah speaks of worshippers coming from beyond the rivers of Cush (Zephaniah 3:10). Ethiopian Christians have taken those texts as speaking of their own nation for many centuries, and the confidence that Ethiopia has a place in the Bible's own geography stands behind the willingness to name a highland town after the holy city.

4. How a Church Is Cut Out of Rock

A rock-hewn church is made by removing stone and never by adding it. The masons began on the surface of the hillside, marked out a rectangle, and cut a trench down around it on three or four sides until a free-standing block of rock was left in the middle of a pit. They then dressed the outside of that block into walls, string courses, blind windows and a roof. Only after the outside was finished did they cut doorways and window openings and start hollowing the inside, working downward and outward, leaving columns and arches in place as they went.

The sequence cannot be reversed and it cannot be corrected. A block that is over-cut is over-cut permanently, because there is no way to put stone back. Every column at Lalibela is a column of rock that was deliberately left standing while the masons removed everything around it, and every capital and arch was reached by cutting down to it from above. The work demanded that the finished plan be held in mind from the first blow, since the interior was carved blind, in poor light, from the top down.

The three types on the site

Not every church at Lalibela is freed from the rock on all sides, and the technical vocabulary matters when guides use it.

Aksumite architecture copied in stone

Several facades at Lalibela reproduce, in solid rock, the details of an older Ethiopian building tradition in wood and stone. Aksumite walls were built with horizontal timbers running through the masonry, and the round ends of those timbers projected at intervals across the face. Ethiopian usage calls those projecting ends monkey heads. At Biete Amanuel the masons carved recessed and projecting bands and the round monkey heads into the rock, imitating a timber-laced wall that has no timbers in it at all. The doors and windows echo the same tradition, with stepped frames and the cross-and-lattice window forms familiar from Aksumite stelae.

That imitation tells us something about the builders. They were working within a living architectural language and reproducing its details for the sake of continuity with an older Christian kingdom, which is why the churches read as Ethiopian rather than as Byzantine or Egyptian buildings translated into the highlands.

Drainage, the unglamorous part

A church sunk in a pit collects water. The site carries an extensive system of cut channels, drains and cisterns leading water out of the courtyards and away down the slope, and some of the deep trenches serve as drainage as much as passage. The wells and cisterns in the courtyards hold water that pilgrims treat as blessed. Where the drainage has failed over the centuries, the damage to the rock shows immediately, which is the whole conservation problem at the site.

5. The Eleven Churches at a Glance

Eleven churches are conventionally counted at Lalibela, arranged in three clusters. Names appear in several spellings, because Ge'ez and Amharic are being transliterated into the Latin alphabet without an agreed standard: Biete, Bet and Beta all render the same word for house, and Ghiorgis, Giyorgis and Giorgis are one name.

Counts of the churches at Lalibela vary between guides and publications, because Biete Golgotha and Biete Debre Sina are twinned within one excavation and Biete Meskel and Biete Denagel are chapels within the Biete Maryam complex. Eleven is the conventional figure, matching the UNESCO inscription, and it is used throughout this page. The table above records the names and associations given in the standard published descriptions of the site; where a use is uncertain, the entry says so.

6. The Northern Group

The northern group holds five of the eleven churches within a single excavated complex north of the Yordanos channel, with Biete Golgotha and Biete Debre Sina twinned inside one excavation and counted together as one. It contains the largest church on the site and its most heavily decorated interiors. The visitor enters through a cut passage and comes out in a courtyard sunk well below the level of the surrounding ground, with rock walls rising on every side and cells and tombs cut into them.

Biete Medhane Alem

Biete Medhane Alem, the House of the Saviour of the World, is a monolithic church surrounded on all four sides by a colonnade of squared rock pillars, giving it the look of a Greek temple worked out of a single stone. The UNESCO World Heritage Centre's entry describes it as believed to be the largest monolithic church in the world, and it is by any measure the largest of the eleven. Rows of pillars run down the interior, dividing it into a nave and four aisles under a flat carved ceiling.

The church is the keeper of the Lalibela Cross, a large processional cross of worked metal that the community treats as its principal treasure and which is brought out and shown by a priest. The cross was stolen in 1997 and recovered afterwards, and it is now guarded closely. Ethiopian processional crosses of this kind are held on a shaft, carried at the head of a procession, and offered to the faithful to kiss.

The description of Biete Medhane Alem as believed to be the largest monolithic church in the world is the wording of the UNESCO World Heritage Centre's published entry for the site, and is reported here as their assessment. The theft and recovery of the Lalibela Cross in 1997 was widely reported at the time.

Biete Maryam

Biete Maryam, the House of Mary, opens off the same complex and is the church most often described as the oldest of the group and the one most closely tied to the local devotional life. Its interior carries painted decoration on the ceilings and upper walls, carved crosses and geometric panels, and a porch with a carved arch. Ethiopian Christians hold Marian devotion very high, and Biete Maryam is where that devotion is concentrated at the site.

A pillar inside the church stands permanently wrapped in cloth. The tradition attached to it is that the pillar carries writing recording the beginning and the end of the world, given to King Lalibela, and that it is veiled because it must not be read. The Ethiopian Orthodox community treats the veiled pillar with great reverence. This page reports the tradition and makes no claim about what is under the cloth, and readers should notice that the tradition itself insists the text stays covered, which cuts against every attempt to read a date out of it.

Biete Golgotha and Biete Debre Sina

These two are twinned within one excavation, entered together, and they hold the carved figure sculpture of the site. Biete Golgotha carries life-size figures of saints carved in high relief on the piers, which is rare in Ethiopian art and rare anywhere in rock-cut architecture. Between the two churches lies the Selassie Chapel, the Chapel of the Trinity, access to which is tightly restricted, and the traditional tomb of King Lalibela is shown here. Biete Golgotha has by long custom been closed to women, and that custom is still kept.

Biete Meskel and Biete Denagel

Biete Meskel, the House of the Cross, is a gallery cut into the north wall of the Biete Maryam courtyard, a long low chapel behind a row of piers. Biete Denagel, the House of the Virgins, is a small chapel remembering virgin martyrs, associated in local tradition with nuns martyred under the emperor Julian. Both are modest spaces, and both show how the excavation was used to its limits, with chapels carved into the sides of a courtyard that had already been dug for something else.

7. Biete Ghiorgis, the House of Saint George

Biete Ghiorgis is the church that appears on every poster of Ethiopia, cut in the plan of an equal-armed cross and standing free in a deep rectangular pit south-west of the other two groups. Its roof is carved with three concentric stepped crosses, one inside the other, and because the roof is level with the ground around it, the whole church can be taken in at a glance from the rim of the pit. A church read this way, from above and entire, is unusual anywhere in Christian architecture.

Access is by a trench cut through the rock and sloping down to the floor of the pit, so a pilgrim walks into the ground and arrives at the base of a building whose top he has just been standing beside. The walls rise about a dozen metres from the pit floor, carried on a stepped plinth, with tall windows in the Aksumite manner cut into each arm of the cross. Hermit cells and burial niches are cut into the walls of the pit around the church, and mummified remains have been kept in some of them.

The tradition of its founding

Local tradition says Biete Ghiorgis was the last of the churches to be cut. Saint George, according to the story told at the site, appeared to King Lalibela on horseback and complained that no church among all the new foundations had been dedicated to him, and the king promised him the finest of them all. Guides point to marks in the rock of the approach trench and identify them as the hoofprints of the saint's horse. Saint George is among the most widely venerated saints in Ethiopia after the Virgin, and this site covers his life and his cult on the page for Saint George.

Why it stands apart

The isolation of Biete Ghiorgis from the two main groups is one of the arguments used in the scholarly discussion of how the site developed, which the section on what scholars dispute about the dating takes up below. A church cut on a separate outcrop, in a different technique of exceptional refinement, and with no trench connecting it to the rest, looks like a distinct campaign of work rather than part of one simultaneous programme.

8. The South-Eastern Group

The south-eastern group holds five churches on the far side of the channel called the Yordanos, and it is the more irregular and the more puzzling of the two clusters. Several of its buildings show features that are hard to explain as churches, which has led a number of archaeologists to argue that some of these excavations began as fortifications, residences or a royal complex and were converted to Christian use afterwards.

Biete Amanuel

Biete Amanuel, the House of Emmanuel, is a free-standing monolith, and published descriptions of the site regularly single out its exterior carving as the most carefully finished at Lalibela. Its walls reproduce the Aksumite system of recessed and projecting horizontal bands with round timber ends, all of it cut in the rock, and the effect at a distance is of a timber-framed palace church in stone. The building's quality and plan have led several scholars to propose that it served as the royal chapel of the Zagwe court.

Biete Gabriel-Rufael

Biete Gabriel-Rufael, dedicated to the archangels Gabriel and Raphael, sits behind a deep trench crossed by a walkway, with an irregular plan and a facade of tall arched openings that reads more like a defended building than a church. Its shape has often been taken as evidence of an earlier secular function, and it is the building most often named in the argument that part of the site is a converted palace complex. This site covers the archangels and their place in Christian teaching on its guide to angels in Catholic teaching.

Biete Abba Libanos and Biete Lehem

Biete Abba Libanos is a semi-monolithic church whose roof remains joined to the parent rock above it, so the building appears to hang under the mountain, with light entering only from the front and sides. Local tradition holds it was cut in one night by Queen Meskel Kebra with the help of angels. Behind and above it, reached by a passage, is Biete Lehem, Bethlehem, a small round hermitage associated with the preparation of the bread for the Eucharist.

Biete Qeddus Mercoreus

Biete Qeddus Mercoreus, the House of Saint Mercurius, is largely hypogeous, and it is the church whose earlier use is most openly doubted. Ankle fetters were found within it, which is why several published accounts propose that the excavation was originally a prison or a court building. Fragments of painting survive inside. Saint Mercurius is a soldier saint venerated widely in the Coptic and Ethiopian churches, and the dedication reflects the close historical bond between the Ethiopian church and the Coptic Orthodox Church of Egypt.

9. The Trenches, Tunnels and Hermit Cells

The trenches between the churches are part of the monument and carry as much of its meaning as the buildings do. Deep cut passages link courtyard to courtyard, some open to the sky, some roofed by rock, and one long tunnel runs in complete darkness between the south-eastern churches. Pilgrims are led through it without light, and the tradition explains the passage as the way through hell or through death, ending at the doorway that opens onto Golgotha.

Cut into the vertical walls of the trenches are many small openings: hermit cells, storerooms and burial niches. Some cells were occupied by ascetics for years at a time, and monks and nuns still live in the area around the churches. Others hold bones and mummified remains of pilgrims and hermits, visible through their openings, kept in the trench walls the way catacomb burials are kept in the walls of a gallery. This site describes the Roman parallel on its guide to the catacombs of Rome.

The wells and the water

Cisterns and pools cut into the rock hold water at several points, most visibly in the deep pool beside Biete Gabriel-Rufael and at Biete Maryam. Water at Lalibela is treated as blessed, and women hoping for children have traditionally bathed at the pool near Biete Maryam. The cutting of pools and channels was practical drainage work that the devotional life of the site then absorbed into itself, which is a pattern repeated at holy places all over the Christian world.

10. Inside an Ethiopian Church

An Ethiopian Orthodox church is arranged in three concentric zones, and the arrangement at Lalibela follows the same rule as everywhere else in the country. The outer zone, the qene mahlet, is where the debtera stand and chant. The middle zone, the qeddest, is where communicants receive. The innermost zone, the maqdas or qeddesta qeddusan, holds the tabot and is entered only by priests. Shoes are removed before entering any of the three.

The tabot

The tabot is the consecrated tablet that stands on the altar of every Ethiopian Orthodox church, understood as representing the Ark of the Covenant and the tablets of the Law that the Ark contained. No Ethiopian church is a church without one. The tabot is never displayed uncovered, and when it leaves the sanctuary in procession at Timkat it is wrapped in embroidered cloth and carried on the head of a priest under an umbrella. Ethiopian tradition holds that the Ark of the Covenant itself is kept at the church of Our Lady Mary of Zion in Axum, in the north of the country, in the custody of a single appointed guardian, and that claim is one that the Ethiopian church makes and that no outside party has verified.

The chant of Saint Yared

Ethiopian liturgical chant, zema, is traced by tradition to Saint Yared, a sixth-century Aksumite deacon credited with receiving the modes of Ethiopian chant and setting down the chant books, including the Digua. The system uses three modes, ge'ez, ezl and araray, and a notation of small signs written above the Ge'ez text. Chant at a major feast is accompanied by the kebero drum, the tsenatsil sistrum shaken in the hand, and the mequamia prayer staff, which the debtera lean on through long night offices and strike on the floor in rhythm.

The debtera perform aquaquam, a measured liturgical dance in rows, swaying and stepping with staff and sistrum. The Ethiopian church justifies it by David dancing before the Ark (2 Samuel 6:14), and it is one of the features of Ethiopian worship that visitors from other traditions find most striking.

Fasting and the calendar

The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church keeps one of the most demanding fasting disciplines in Christianity, with a large part of the year set aside as fast days on which the devout eat nothing from animals and take their first meal late in the day. It follows the Ethiopian calendar, which has thirteen months, twelve of thirty days and a short thirteenth, and which runs seven to eight years behind the Gregorian year. Feasts therefore fall on Gregorian dates that shift by a day in some years, which is why Ethiopian Christmas and Timkat are sometimes listed with two possible dates.

Published accounts commonly give around 180 fasting days in the year for the Ethiopian Orthodox laity, with a considerably higher figure for clergy and monastics. Those counts vary between authors and between dioceses, so this page describes the discipline qualitatively rather than fixing a number.

11. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church

The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church owns and serves the churches at Lalibela, and it is one of the largest Christian bodies in Africa and one of the oldest anywhere. Its liturgical language is Ge'ez, its rite belongs to the Alexandrian family, and its head is the Patriarch of Ethiopia, whose seat is in Addis Ababa. The word Tewahedo is Ge'ez for made one or united, and it names the Christological position the church holds.

What Tewahedo means

The Ethiopian church confesses that in Christ the divine and the human are united in one incarnate nature of the Word, following the formula associated with Saint Cyril of Alexandria, and it insists that this union is without mixture, without confusion, without change and without separation. Theologians call this position miaphysite. The Ethiopian church rejects Eutyches and rejects any teaching that the humanity of Christ was absorbed or diminished by the divinity, and it regards the label monophysite as a misdescription of what it believes.

The historical division came at the Council of Chalcedon in 451, which taught that Christ is acknowledged in two natures, divine and human, in one person and one hypostasis. The churches that became the Oriental Orthodox family read the Chalcedonian formula as dividing Christ and did not receive the council. The Catholic Church holds Chalcedon as an ecumenical council and its definition as binding. Those are the positions as each body states them.

Independence from Alexandria

For most of its history the Ethiopian church was headed by a metropolitan sent from the Coptic Orthodox patriarchate in Alexandria, and Ethiopian bishops were consecrated in Egypt. That arrangement ended in stages in the twentieth century, with Ethiopian bishops consecrated from the 1940s and the Coptic Orthodox patriarchate recognising the Ethiopian church as autocephalous with its own patriarch in 1959. The Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church became a separate autocephalous church after Eritrean independence, in an arrangement recognised by Alexandria in the 1990s.

The Ethiopian canon of Scripture

The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church is commonly described as using the broadest biblical canon of any historic church, conventionally counted as eighty-one books, and it includes works that no other tradition receives as Scripture, among them the Book of Enoch and the Book of Jubilees. The Catholic canon differs from the Protestant canon over a smaller set of books, and this site sets out that question on its guide to the deuterocanonical books. Ethiopian practice also preserves observances with an Old Testament character, including circumcision on the eighth day, dietary restrictions, and the keeping of both Saturday and Sunday.

The Kebra Nagast, the fourteenth-century Ethiopian national epic, tells of the Queen of Sheba, Solomon, and their son Menelik, and grounds the claim that the Ark came to Ethiopia and that the Ethiopian royal line descends from Solomon. The Zagwe kings, including Lalibela, were outside that claimed Solomonic line, and the dynasty that followed them made a great deal of the fact. Understanding the tension is useful at Lalibela, because a Zagwe king who built a New Jerusalem in his own highlands was making a religious claim about his kingship at a time when his legitimacy was contested.

Where to read more

This site treats the Ethiopian church's history, structure and beliefs in full on its guide to the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, and the wider communion on its guide to the Oriental Orthodox churches. The broader picture of Christianity across the continent, including the growth of the church in Africa, is covered on the page for Christianity in Africa.

12. Oriental Orthodox, Not Eastern Orthodox

Lalibela belongs to an Oriental Orthodox church, and Oriental Orthodox is a different communion from Eastern Orthodox. The two families are not in communion with each other, they divided in the fifth century over Chalcedon rather than in the eleventh century over Rome, and treating them as one body misrepresents both. A reader who conflates them will misread almost everything about Ethiopian Christianity.

This site covers the Byzantine family on its guide to the Eastern Orthodox Church and the eleventh-century division with Rome on its guide to the Great Schism of 1054. Neither of those pages describes Lalibela, because Lalibela belongs to the other family entirely.

What the Catholic Church says about these churches

The Catholic Church holds that the Oriental Orthodox churches possess apostolic succession, a valid priesthood and a valid Eucharist, and that real though imperfect communion therefore exists between them and the Catholic Church. Speaking of the Eastern Churches that are not in full communion with Rome, a description that covers the Oriental Orthodox as well as the Byzantine churches, the Catechism says that they possess true sacraments and above all, by apostolic succession, the priesthood and the Eucharist (CCC 1399).

Joint Christological declarations signed since the 1970s record agreement on the faith once disputed at Chalcedon. Pope Paul VI and Pope Shenouda III of Alexandria signed such a declaration in 1973, and Pope John Paul II and the Syriac Orthodox Patriarch Ignatius Zakka I Iwas signed another in 1984. The common judgment expressed in that dialogue is that the ancient dispute turned substantially on the meaning of terms rather than on a difference in the faith confessed. Full communion has not been restored, and the questions of primacy and of the later councils remain open. This site discusses the whole effort on its guide to ecumenism.

The Ethiopian Catholic Church

There is also an Ethiopian Catholic Church, in full communion with Rome, which celebrates the same Alexandrian rite in Ge'ez and has its own metropolitan see at Addis Ababa. It is one of the Eastern Catholic churches, covered on this site's guide to the Eastern Catholic churches. Its existence means that the liturgy heard at Lalibela is close to a liturgy celebrated by Catholics in the same country and the same language.

13. Genna, Christmas at Lalibela

Genna is Ethiopian Christmas, the feast of the Nativity, kept on 29 Tahsas in the Ethiopian calendar, which falls on 7 January in most Gregorian years. Lalibela is one of the great gathering places for it, and pilgrims walk in from the surrounding highlands, some of them for several days, arriving in white cotton shammas and filling the sunken courtyards and trenches around the churches.

The observance is preceded by the fast of the Nativity, a long fast kept through the weeks before the feast. The night of Genna is a night office: chanting that runs for hours, drums and sistra, the debtera in rows performing aquaquam by candlelight, priests processing with crosses and umbrellas, and the Divine Liturgy celebrated at dawn. Communicants have fasted from midnight, and the discipline around receiving is strict in the Ethiopian tradition, with many of the faithful communicating rarely and only after long preparation.

What a visitor sees

A visitor at Genna sees a liturgy that fills a landscape. The white of the crowd against red rock, priests in embroidered vestments standing in doorways cut out of the mountain, and chanting rising out of a trench in the dark are the images people carry away from Lalibela. The crowd stands, sits and sleeps on the rock, and the boundary between the church building and the gathering outside it dissolves, because the excavation was arranged for exactly this.

Genna is also the name of a traditional Ethiopian stick game played at the feast, and the word is used for both. That is a small point, and it comes up because the name is sometimes glossed only as the game.

14. Timkat and the Blessing of the Water

Timkat is the Ethiopian Orthodox feast of the Baptism of Christ in the Jordan, kept on 11 Terr in the Ethiopian calendar, falling on 19 January in most Gregorian years and on 20 January in the year before an Ethiopian leap year. It is among the most widely kept public celebrations of the Ethiopian church, and at Lalibela it is celebrated among churches that were laid out to stand for the holy places, beside a channel that carries the name of the Jordan.

The feast runs over three days. On the eve, Ketera, the tabot of each church is taken from the sanctuary, wrapped in embroidered cloth, and carried on the head of a priest in procession to a pool or a river, under ceremonial umbrellas, with drums, sistra, chant and the ululation of the women. The tabots stay overnight in a tent beside the water, with prayer continuing through the night.

Before dawn the water is blessed. The presiding priest prays over it and then sprinkles the crowd or immerses them, and the people receive the sprinkling as a renewal of their baptism. Afterwards the tabots are carried back to their churches in procession, and the celebration continues with chant, dance and feasting. The following day is the feast of Saint Michael the Archangel, and many of the processions carry through into it.

UNESCO inscribed Timkat on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2019, under the title of the Ethiopian Epiphany. The inscription describes the feast as it is celebrated across Ethiopia rather than at Lalibela alone.

15. What Scholars Dispute About the Dating

The scholarly question at Lalibela is whether the eleven churches were cut in one campaign under one king or whether they represent several phases of work across a longer period. Ethiopian tradition holds the first. A number of archaeologists who have surveyed the site argue for the second, on the evidence of the cuttings themselves, and the British archaeologist David Phillipson has set out the case in detail in published work on Ethiopian archaeology.

The arguments for multiple phases run roughly as follows. Some excavations, particularly in the south-eastern group, have plans and features that suit fortification or residence better than liturgy, and appear to have been adapted afterwards. The techniques of cutting are not uniform across the site, and the refinement of Biete Ghiorgis and Biete Amanuel is markedly higher than that of some neighbours. The Aksumite detailing on some facades points to a tradition already several centuries old when it was copied. On this reading, an existing complex of rock-cut structures was reworked and extended under Lalibela, whose reign is the point at which the whole was given its Jerusalem programme.

The argument for the traditional account is that Ethiopian tradition has transmitted the memory of a real royal building programme, that the site's coherence as a New Jerusalem is hard to explain except as a single conception, and that the hagiographical life, whatever its miracle stories, preserves the historical fact of a king who made these churches. Radiocarbon dating on the site has been limited, and no inscription securely dates any of the eleven to a year.

The multiple-phase argument summarised here is that of published archaeological scholarship on Ethiopia, including the work of David Phillipson; the single-campaign account is the tradition maintained by the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church and the community at Lalibela. This page states both and settles neither, because the dating evidence published to date does not settle it.

What is not in dispute

No one disputes that the churches are medieval, that they are Ethiopian Christian work, that they were cut with hand tools out of living rock, or that they have been in continuous liturgical use. The dispute is over the sequence and the number of campaigns, which is a normal archaeological question and carries no implication about the faith of the people who made or use the site.

16. Weather, Shelters and Conservation

The rock at Lalibela is soft, and that is the conservation problem. The same quality that let masons cut a church out of a mountain with iron tools lets rain, frost and salt take it apart. Water running into the trenches erodes the bases of the walls, water absorbed into the stone brings salts to the surface as it dries, and carved detail spalls away. Some of the churches have lost sharpness on their exterior mouldings within living memory.

Protective shelters of steel and fabric were erected over several of the churches in the 2000s, funded through international conservation programmes and intended as a temporary measure while a permanent solution was studied. They have been criticised on aesthetic grounds and questioned on technical ones, and the question of how long they should stay has been argued between conservation bodies, the Ethiopian authorities and the Church. Any reader looking at photographs of Lalibela should know that some images show churches under shelters and others do not.

Conservation work at Lalibela is complicated by the fact that these are working churches. A conservator cannot treat the site as a ruin to be stabilised, because priests celebrate in it, pilgrims sleep in its courtyards, and the community regards it as its own. Every intervention has to be agreed with the church that owns the buildings, which is the proper order of things and which slows the work.

This page gives no account of the current condition of individual churches, of what shelters stand today, or of which conservation projects are in progress, because that information changes and cannot be verified from here. Readers who need current information should consult the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, the Ethiopian heritage authorities and the UNESCO World Heritage Centre directly.

17. A Catholic at Lalibela

A Catholic at Lalibela is a guest in the house of another church. The buildings belong to the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, the priests who serve them answer to their own patriarch, and the customs of the site are that church's customs. The right posture is the ordinary one for any Christian entering a church that is not his own: keep the house rules exactly, ask before doing anything, and do not treat living worship as a spectacle.

The practical rules

Shoes come off before entering any church, without exception, and they are left at the door. Shoulders and knees are covered for everyone, and women commonly cover their heads with a white scarf inside. Biete Golgotha is closed to women by long custom, and the custom is kept. The sanctuary is entered by priests alone, and the tabot is not to be looked for, photographed or asked about. Photography elsewhere is permitted at some times and refused at others, and the answer belongs to the priest present.

Fasting seasons affect what is offered and eaten, and a visitor who arrives during a fast will find the whole town keeping it. Feast days fill the site with worshippers who have travelled far, and a visitor at Genna or Timkat should expect to give way, stand at the back, and stay out of processions.

Communion

A Catholic does not present himself for communion at an Ethiopian Orthodox liturgy. The Catholic Church recognises the Eucharist celebrated in these churches as valid, and it does not follow that a Catholic may receive it. Reception expresses a communion that is not yet restored, and the Oriental Orthodox churches themselves have strict rules on who receives and after what preparation. The honest and courteous course is to attend, to pray, and to stay in your place.

What to take away from it

Lalibela is a witness that Christianity in Africa is not an import of the colonial period. The Ethiopian church was cutting cathedrals out of mountains while much of Europe was still building in timber, and it had been Christian for eight hundred years by the time King Lalibela's masons started work. Any Catholic who arrives with a European picture of church history in his head should let Lalibela correct it. This site develops that point on its guide to Christian pilgrimage sites across Africa, and sets out what a pilgrimage is for on the page explaining what a pilgrimage is.

18. Frequently Asked Questions