Armed with a bamboo ink pen and a steady hand, Ethiopian Orthodox priest Zelalem Mola carefully copies text in the ancient scriptural language Geez from a religious book onto a goatskin parchment.
This painstaking task is preserving an ancient tradition, while bringing him closer to God, 42-year-old Mola said.
At the Hamere Berhan Institute in Addis Ababa, priests and lay worshipers work by hand to replicate sometimes centuries-old religious manuscripts and sacred artwork.
Photo: AFP
The parchments, pens and ink are prepared at the institute, in the Piasa district in the historic heart of the Ethiopian capital.
Hamere Berhan head of communications Yeshiemebet Sisay, 29, said the work began four years ago.
“Ancient parchment manuscripts are disappearing from our culture, which motivated us to start this project,” she says.
The precious works are mainly kept in monasteries, where prayers or religious chants are conducted using only parchment rather than paper manuscripts.
“However, this custom is rapidly fading... We thought if we could learn skills from our priests, we could work on it ourselves, so that is how we began,” Yeshiemebet said.
In the institute’s courtyard, workers stretch the goatskins tightly over metal frames to dry under a weak sun.
“After the goatskin is immersed in the water for three to four days, we make holes on the edge of the skin and tie it to the metal so that it can stretch,” Tinsaye Chere Ayele said. “After that, we remove the extra layer of fat on the skin’s inside to make it clean.”
Once clean and dry, the skins are stripped of the goat hair and cut to the desired size for use as pages of a book or for painting.
Yeshiemebet said that most of the manuscripts are commissioned by individuals who donate them to churches or monasteries.
Some customers order small collections of prayers or paintings to have “reproductions of ancient Ethiopian works,” she said.
“Small books can take one or two months. If it is a collective work, large books can take one to two years. If it’s an individual task, it can take even longer,” she said.
Sitting in one of the institute’s rooms, with parchment pages placed on his knees, Zelalem patiently copies a book, entitled Zena Selassie — “History of the Trinity.”
“It is going to take a lot of time. It’s hard work, starting with the preparation of the parchment and the inks. This one could take up to six months to complete,” Zelalem said. “We make a stylus from bamboo, sharpening the tip with a razor blade.”
The scribes use different pens for each color used in the text — black or red — and either a fine or broad tip, with the inks made from local plants.
Like most other religious works, Zena Selassie is written in Geez.
This dead language remains the liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and its alpha syllabic system — where the characters represent syllables — is still used to write Ethiopia’s national language, Amharic, as well as Tigrinya, which is spoken in Tigray and neighboring Eritrea.
“We copy from paper to parchment to preserve [the writings] as the paper book can be easily damaged, while this one will last a long time if we protect it from water and fire,” Zelalem said.
Replicating the manuscripts “needs patience and focus. It begins with a prayer in the morning, at lunchtime, and ends with prayer,” Zelalem said.
Drug lord Jose Adolfo Macias Villamar, alias “Fito,” was Ecuador’s most-wanted fugitive before his arrest on Wednesday, more than a year after he escaped prison from where he commanded the country’s leading criminal gang. The former taxi driver turned crime boss became the prime target of law enforcement early last year after escaping from a prison in the southwestern port of Guayaquil. Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa’s government released “wanted” posters with images of his face and offered US$1 million for information leading to his capture. In a country plagued by crime, members of Fito’s gang, Los Choneros, have responded with violence, using car
The team behind the long-awaited Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile yesterday published their first images, revealing breathtaking views of star-forming regions as well as distant galaxies. More than two decades in the making, the giant US-funded telescope sits perched at the summit of Cerro Pachon in central Chile, where dark skies and dry air provide ideal conditions for observing the cosmos. One of the debut images is a composite of 678 exposures taken over just seven hours, capturing the Trifid Nebula and the Lagoon Nebula — both several thousand light-years from Earth — glowing in vivid pinks against orange-red backdrops. The new image
CYBERCRIME, TRAFFICKING: A ‘pattern of state failures’ allowed the billion-dollar industry to flourish, including failures to investigate human rights abuses, it said Human rights group Amnesty International yesterday accused Cambodia’s government of “deliberately ignoring” abuses by cybercrime gangs that have trafficked people from across the world, including children, into slavery at brutal scam compounds. The London-based group said in a report that it had identified 53 scam centers and dozens more suspected sites across the country, including in the Southeast Asian nation’s capital, Phnom Penh. The prison-like compounds were ringed by high fences with razor wire, guarded by armed men and staffed by trafficking victims forced to defraud people across the globe, with those inside subjected to punishments including shocks from electric batons, confinement
Canada and the EU on Monday signed a defense and security pact as the transatlantic partners seek to better confront Russia, with worries over Washington’s reliability under US President Donald Trump. The deal was announced after a summit in Brussels between Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Antonio Costa. “While NATO remains the cornerstone of our collective defense, this partnership will allow us to strengthen our preparedness ... to invest more and to invest smarter,” Costa told a news conference. “It opens new opportunities for companies on both sides of the
RSS