Inside the rock-hewn Medhane Alem Church, in the remote mountain town of Lalibela, the late-afternoon Mass was drawing to a conclusion. Barely visible through the cavernous gloom, hundreds of white-muslin-wrapped worshipers huddled beside pillars and prostrated themselves on small rugs, kissing the cold stone floor. In the sanctuary, priests and deacons gathered around tattered Bibles written in Geez, the 2,500-year-old language still used in Ethiopian ritual, chanting prayers that echoed through the vaulted chamber.
Then the faithful turned as one toward the east, in the direction of Jerusalem. Secreted in an alcove behind a scarlet curtain, forbidden from view to all but a select group of priests and monks, lay a golden cross belonging to the revered King Lalibela, and a replica of the Holy Ark, the wooden box encased in gold that supposedly contained the tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments.
I had arrived in Lalibela, fortuitously, just before the Feast of the Transfiguration, Aug. 6, a key date in the Orthodox Christian calendar that commemorates Jesus’ appearance in divine form before three of his apostles on Mount Tabor. Within a few minutes, my guide had whisked me to the grandest of King Lalibela’s 11 monolithic churches, chiseled out of a single mass of reddish limestone by royal craftsmen at the end of the 11th and the beginning of the 12th centuries.
The churches of Lalibela, a dirt-poor mountain village that has remained essentially unchanged for a millennium, constitute the most remarkable part of what Ethiopians call “the historic tour” — a several-day circuit through ancient Christian kingdoms that flourished in the northern highlands beginning in the fourth century AD. According to legend, Syrian monks crossed the Red Sea then and converted the Aksumite king, Ezana, from paganism to Christianity. Over the following centuries, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church spread throughout the country.
Today, it is widely believed that about half of Ethiopia’s 70 million people are Orthodox Christians (though some experts contend that Islam is now the predominant religion). In the northernmost province of Tigray, where the Orthodox religion took root, 3,500 churches cover the landscape, and the practice of Orthodoxy is nearly universal.
the road from conflict to peace
For decades, however, access to the historic sites, and to Ethiopia in general, has been subject to the vagaries of politics and war. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Soviet-backed Marxist dictatorship known as the Dergue, led by Haile Mengistu Mariam, sealed itself off from the West, while torturing and murdering tens of thousands of opponents and presiding over the catastrophic 1984 famine in which one million people died.
After months of fierce fighting, a coalition of rebel forces overthrew President Mengistu in 1991. (He fled into exile in Zimbabwe.)
Over the next seven years, foreigners — mostly humanitarian aid workers, diplomats, journalists and hardy backpackers — trickled into Ethiopia. I visited the country during this period, when I was based in Nairobi as a correspondent, and it was a rewarding but rough experience.
The door slammed shut in 1998, when a territorial dispute between Ethiopia and Eritrea erupted in a savage war that lasted for two years. The conflict ended with a peace deal signed in 2000.
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