Rock-hewn churches of Lalibela

The rock-hewn churches of Lalibela are eleven churches carved downwards out of solid volcanic rock at a town of the same name, about 2,500 metres up in the highlands of northern Ethiopia. Tradition credits them to Gebre Meskel Lalibela, a king of the Zagwe dynasty who reigned from about 1181 to 1221 and set out to build a new Jerusalem in his own kingdom. They are still in daily use by the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and remain one of its chief places of pilgrimage.

The Zagwe were an Agaw dynasty from the Lasta region who held power in the northern highlands from roughly 1137 to 1270, after the long decline of the Kingdom of Aksum. Ethiopian tradition says that before he became king, Lalibela was taken on a tour of Jerusalem by Christ and told to build a second one at home. The town, then called Roha, took his name, and the layout of the churches echoes the holy city: a channel cut between the groups is named the Jordan, and one church holds replicas of the tomb of Christ. Because the names and plan point so clearly to Jerusalem, some experts link the main work to the years after Saladin captured that city in 1187.

How long the work took, and who began it, is debated. The art historian David Buxton argued that carving on this scale must have outlasted one reign and continued into the fourteenth century. The archaeologist David Phillipson has proposed that three of the churches began, perhaps between 600 and 800, as fortifications or palace buildings of the Aksumite period that were later converted, while a local historian credits one church to Lalibela's widow as his memorial. Excavations have found pottery and animal bones from about 900 to 1100, suggesting that the site was an ordinary settlement before it became a sacred one.

The churches were made by removing stone rather than building with it. Masons cut trenches into the hillside with hammers and chisels and then hollowed out the blocks left standing, working from the top down. Four of the eleven stand completely free of the surrounding rock; the other seven remain joined to it on one side. Five lie north of the channel called the Jordan and five south of it, linked by tunnels and passages, while the cross-shaped Church of Saint George stands alone in a pit about 25 metres square, reached through a narrow cutting. Biete Medhane Alem is thought to be the largest monolithic church in the world, and Biete Maryam has painted ceilings with biblical scenes. Scholars see strong Aksumite tradition in the stone imitations of timber framing and in window shapes that recall the stelae of Aksum, with some decorative influence from Coptic Egypt and Syria.

The Zagwe were overthrown in 1270 by Yekuno Amlak, founder of the Solomonic line, but the churches continued in use. A Venetian world map of 1457 to 1459 records the name as Lalabeda. The Portuguese priest Francisco Álvares visited in the 1520s and wrote at length, swearing that his account was true for fear that no one would believe it. A sixteenth-century Muslim chronicle says that Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi, during his invasion of Ethiopia from the Adal Sultanate, set fire to one church; the historian Richard Pankhurst doubted the story, noting that the royal chronicles say nothing of it.

In 1936, during the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, Emperor Haile Selassie made a risky pilgrimage to the churches shortly before Italian troops took the town. During the civil war of the 1980s rebels repeatedly attacked Lalibela, and in 2021 it changed hands several times during the Tigray War.

UNESCO placed the churches on the World Heritage List in 1978. Conservation has been difficult. Four large shelters were raised over five of the churches in 2008 with European Union funding as a temporary measure, but they have stayed far longer than planned, and their weight now itself threatens the buildings beneath; Ethiopia's heritage authority has said they must be removed. Other restoration projects have been hampered by poor communication between the heritage authority, the church and the local community.