Lalibela Rock-Hewn Churches

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A mason at Lalibela began not by laying a stone but by cutting a trench. Working from the surface of a sloping shelf of red volcanic rock in the highlands of Lasta, the carvers drove a deep rectangular channel into the ground on four sides, isolating a great block of basalt from the mountain around it. Then they went down. The block that remained — attached to the bedrock only at its base, freestanding on every other face — was hollowed from above and within until it became a church: nave, aisles, columns, vaults, doorways, and windows, all of one piece with the earth, none of it assembled. Nothing was added; everything was taken away. The eleven churches of Lalibela are not buildings raised on the land but negative spaces released from it, monoliths quarried into the shape of worship. To stand at the lip of the courtyard of Bete Giyorgis and look down at the cruciform roof some twelve meters below is to grasp the inversion at the heart of the place: the church is reached by descending, and the rock did not receive a structure so much as surrender one.

Bete Giyorgis (Church of Saint George), carved as a freestanding cruciform monolith set below ground level. — Bernard Gagnon, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The technique is subtractive in the strictest sense. Hammers and chisels of iron, cutting into a stone soft enough to work and hard enough to hold an edge — a hydrothermally altered basaltic scoria capped in places by a more tractable red tuff — produced not only the outer shells but every interior member. A column at Lalibela was never set in place; it is the rock that the carvers chose not to remove, dressed afterward into a pier with capital and base. A window tracery is a void cut where stone once stood. There is no joint anywhere in the fabric of a true monolith, because there are no two pieces to join. The largest of them, Bete Medhane Alem, the House of the Saviour of the World, stands within its own quarried pit at roughly thirty-three and a half meters long, twenty-three and a half wide, and eleven high, surrounded by a colonnade hewn from the surrounding rock — the largest monolithic church anywhere. Some of the eleven are full monoliths, freed on all sides; others are semi-monolithic or cave churches, their façades cut into a cliff while their backs remain married to the mountain. Trenches connect courtyard to courtyard; tunnels and galleries thread between the two main clusters, so that the whole site is a single excavated organism, a town turned inside-out and downward into stone.

Bete Medhane Alem, the House of the Saviour of the World, ringed by a colonnade hewn from the surrounding rock — the largest monolithic church anywhere. — Jens Klinzing (Forodin), via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

A city remade as the holy city

The town was called Roha before it took the name of the king. Tradition within the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church holds that Gebre Mesqel Lalibela, a sovereign of the Zagwe dynasty who reigned at the turn of the thirteenth century, commanded the work — and that the labor of mortal masons was joined, by night, by the labor of angels, so that the excavation advanced faster than human hands alone could account for. The story is not an explanation offered in place of the chisel marks, which are everywhere visible; it is the form the place takes within the faith that keeps it. The churches were carved during years when the road to Jerusalem had grown perilous. Saladin took the city from the Crusaders in 1187, and the long pilgrimage that Ethiopian Christians had made for centuries to the tomb of Christ became, for many, impossible. Lalibela answers that loss directly. It is a Jerusalem made portable by being made local — a holy land set down in the Ethiopian uplands so that the faithful might walk its stations without leaving their own country.

The reproduction is not pictorial but topographic. A watercourse running through the site is named Yordanos, after the river of the baptism, and it divides the complex into two companies of churches as the sacred geography of Palestine is divided by its own waters. North of the channel stand Bete Medhane Alem, Bete Maryam — the House of Mary, often held to be among the earliest and most lavishly painted — Bete Maskal, the House of the Cross, Bete Denagel, the House of Virgins, and the linked chambers of Golgotha and Mikael. South and east of the channel lie Bete Amanuel, the House of Emmanuel, with its finely modeled Aksumite façade, Bete Qeddus Mercoreus, Bete Abba Libanos, set against its cliff, Bete Gabriel-Rufael, and Bete Lehem, the House of Holy Bread, whose name carries Bethlehem into the rock. Within these walls the holy places of the Gospel are gathered and renamed: a chapel of Golgotha for the place of the crucifixion, a sculpted Tomb of Adam, a chapel of the Trinity, and a sepulcher modeled on the tomb in which Christ was laid. The two great prototypes are explicit. The crucifixion and burial complex looks to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the shrine raised over Calvary and the empty tomb; the House of Holy Bread looks to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, the basilica over the cave of the birth. To move through Lalibela in procession is to walk from the manger to the cross to the tomb without crossing the sea — the whole arc of salvation compressed into a few hundred meters of carved highland.

This is sacred topography in its most literal register: not a depiction of the holy city but a second instance of it, a place where the names of Jerusalem and Bethlehem are not borrowed as metaphor but laid claim to as presence. The identification is the tradition’s own, sustained in liturgy and pilgrimage rather than argued from documents; and within that tradition the rock of Lasta is not like the holy land but is, for the worshipper who descends into it, the holy land itself.

The faith carried into the rock

Lalibela belongs to one of the oldest unbroken Christian communions on earth. The conversion of the kingdom of Aksum in the fourth century, under the king Ezana, set Ethiopian Christianity on a course that ran on after Aksum’s power waned, and the Zagwe rulers who carved Lalibela understood themselves as heirs to that older Christian state, even as they ruled from the highlands rather than the northern plateau. The church the masons cut into the rock is the church of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo tradition — Tewahedo, meaning made-one, naming the miaphysite confession of the single united nature of the incarnate Word that this church shares with the other Oriental Orthodox communions of Egypt, Syria, and Armenia. For long centuries its patriarch, the abuna, was a single bishop sent from the Coptic church of Alexandria, binding Ethiopia to the see of Saint Mark and through it to the deep memory of the faith in ancient Egypt. The Aksumite inheritance is written into the very ornament of the churches: in the carved imitation of the old timber-and-stone building manner, the recessed string courses, the blind windows, and the projecting beam-ends that earlier Aksumite builders had constructed in wood and that the Lalibela carvers reproduced, purely decoratively, in solid stone — a memory of carpentry frozen in rock that no longer needed it.

Bete Amanuel, the House of Emmanuel, whose finely modeled facade reproduces the recessed courses and projecting beam-ends of Aksumite architecture in solid rock. — Sailko, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

The impulse to make a sanctuary by withdrawing into living rock runs deep in the Christian East. The first generations of desert monasticism in Egypt sought God in caves and cells cut from the wilderness, and the eastern monastic tradition that grew from them — austere, cave-dwelling, given to the long offices of the night — shaped Ethiopian monasticism from its beginnings. Ethiopia’s own monastic founders, remembered figures like the Nine Saints who arrived from the eastern Mediterranean world in the late fifth century, and later the great houses of Debre Damo and Debre Libanos, carried that ascetic current into the highlands. Lalibela is the monumental flower of a far older habit: the cave church, the rock cell, the sanctuary hewn rather than raised. Bete Abba Libanos itself bears the name of one of those monastic fathers. Across the same continent and the centuries that followed, the genius for an indigenous African Christianity would take many forms, from these carved highland sanctuaries to the later African-initiated churches of the modern era; Lalibela stands as one of its earliest and most enduring monuments, a Christianity not imported as a finished thing but worked, like the rock, into a wholly local shape.

What the rock has been made to say

The history of Lalibela is read today from two records held against each other: the chronicle of the saint-king preserved in the church’s own hagiography, the gadl of Lalibela, and the physical stratigraphy of the rock itself. The most influential modern synthesis is David W. Phillipson’s Ancient Churches of Ethiopia (Yale University Press, 2009), the first study to weave the historical, archaeological, and art-historical evidence into a single account of Ethiopian Christian building from Aksum to the fourteenth century. Phillipson argued that the site is not the product of a single reign but the outcome of phases spread across centuries: certain monuments — among them the structures called Merkorios and Gabriel-Rufael — may reach back to the seventh or eighth century and may not have begun as churches at all, perhaps serving as fortifications or residences in the unsettled period after Aksum’s decline, only later extended and consecrated; while the finest basilican churches, three- and five-aisled and dense with Aksumite detail, belong to the great campaign of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that tradition assigns to King Lalibela himself. The proposal that the site was excavated in distinct stages was set out in detail in “Rock-cut stratigraphy: sequencing the Lalibela churches”, published in Antiquity in 2010 by Phillipson with François-Xavier Fauvelle-Aymar and the geomorphologist Laurent Bruxelles, who read the cut faces of the rock the way an excavator reads soil — as a layered sequence of interventions, each leaving its trace in the stone.

The recovery of the Zagwe themselves is largely the work of Marie-Laure Derat and Claire Bosc-Tiessé, who directed the archaeological mission “Lalibela: archéologie d’un site rupestre” from 2008. Their survey of the wider landscape — published as part of the Azania campaign reports and synthesized by Derat in a history of the dynasty — set Lalibela among the other rock-cut and cave churches of Lasta, of which the older cave sanctuary of Washa Mika’el is one, and treated the contemporary inscriptions and texts rather than only the late hagiographies that had reduced the Zagwe to a sequence of pious legends. Britannica’s account of the town and king places that reign at roughly 1181 to 1221. The scholarship has had to clear away, as well, a body of pseudo-history that attributes the churches to lost builders — to Templars, to Egyptians, to any agency but the one the evidence supports. The tool marks, the local stone, the Aksumite vocabulary, and the documents agree: Lalibela was cut by Ethiopian masons working in an Ethiopian tradition, and the angels of the sacred narrative are the faith’s own way of honoring an achievement that the chisel marks already make plain.

The living courtyard

The churches were never relics. They are the parish sanctuaries of a town where, by some counts, a large share of the residents are priests, deacons, and monks, and where the rock-cut naves carry the daily round of the divine office as they have for eight centuries. The site was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1978, among the first dozen places named to it; that recognition has since carried a tension of its own, between the conservation of a fragile monument and the needs of a working shrine. The same volcanic stone that took the chisel so well weathers under rain and the run of centuries, and to slow the decay the European Union funded a set of broad temporary shelters, erected in 2008 over five of the churches, while the World Monuments Fund and others underwrote study of the structural cracking and the fading wall paintings. The shelters drew objection from the clergy and the community for the way their scaffolding broke the sightlines of holy ground and for the noise their fabric made in the wind during the offices, and they have since become a problem in their own right, a layer of protection now needing protection. The town was caught, too, in the wider conflict of the early 2020s, passing under the control of Tigrayan forces in August 2021 and changing hands again before the year was out — the churches themselves left standing, the worship continuing, the wider danger held over the place as it was held over the whole region.

Yet the deepest measure of Lalibela is taken not in committee reports but in the days of the church year. At Genna, the Ethiopian Christmas of the seventh of January, and at Timkat, the Epiphany that keeps the memory of the baptism in the Jordan, the trenches and rooftops fill with pilgrims in white, tens of thousands of them, who have walked for days to reach the carved holy land. By candlelight the chant rises from sanctuaries that are themselves the rock of the mountain, and the priests carry the tabot in procession down to the channel named for the Jordan, where the river of the baptism runs in stone through the heart of a Jerusalem that the highlands made their own.

→ Related: Zagwe Dynasty · Aksum · Church Of The Holy Sepulchre · Church Of The Nativity · Christianity · Eastern Orthodox Christianity · African Initiated Churches · Monasticism · Eastern Monasticism · Desert Christian Monasticism