12 May Ethiopia: Lalibela and the churches of the North

Once again I am going to innovate in one of my entries. This time, instead of those pictures of incredible landscapes that I'm used to, I'm going to play with light and shadow, black and white, gin and yang, fat and skinny... in order to give free rein to my horny mind, a runaway horse that forces me to wander in permanent search of new adventures.

This time the photos have turned out to be a mess and I'm trying to figure out how to justify it.

So, in the absence of great photos, I am going to dedicate this article to the popularisation of science, which has been, is and will be the raison d'être of this blog of yours.

Legend has it that the origin and construction of the churches of Lalibela is still a great mystery to be unravelled. According to Cuarto Milenio and other sources of known solvency to which I have had access, the churches could have been the result of the dreamlike embodiment on earth of a superior intelligence, coming from another galaxy, perhaps, why not, the distant Ganymede.

Other, less serious, studies attribute its creation to King Gebre Mesqel, descendant of the Queen of Sheba, who in the 13th century wanted to build a new Jerusalem in response to the capture of the city by the Muslims, and who built the churches by carving them into the rock to avoid being located and destroyed by the barbarians.

And speaking of the Queen of Sheba, this girl in the photo below does look like one of her direct descendants. She reminds me of that Cheb Khaled song, Aisha:

Comme si je n'existais pas/ Elle est passée a coté de moi/ Sans un regard, reine de Saba

For those of you for whom reading French is like reading an Etruscan papyrus, I translate it for you, it goes something like this:

As if I didn't exist / she walks past me / without even looking at me, Queen of Sheba

I love it

And this one down here is either a maverick or he didn't quite realise that the uniform of the day was white.

Returning to the churches, it remains a mystery how these eleven churches could have been built by carving them out of the rock in just 26 years. For each one of them they had to carve the shape of the church into the rock downwards, removing the leftover pieces, and when they reached the bottom, they had to trace the door and from there carve the rock upwards on the inside (or something like that, I'm confused, did anyone understand me? with a gin and tonic my explanation is more visual). The fact is that it is so incredible that I am inclined to accept the IV Millennium theory as the most probable one.

If the day of your visit also coincides with Timkat or the feast of the Epiphany or with the feast of Saint Michael (patron saint of paratroopers by the way, what a good time celebrating Saint Michel with the French 2nd Foreign Parachute Regiment,,,) then the experience will be unforgettable, which is exactly what happened to us.

The history of my relationship with the Orthodox Church is a history of cassis: Almost I go to an Orthodox Easter mass in Alaska at a Russian church until I found out it was at 3 a.m., and almost I go to St George's mass in Lalibela until I found out that it lasts six hours and you can't leave once it has started. A pity because the mass was all sung in old Amharic, ideal for picking up even the smallest nuance, but we had a long way to go to get to Mekele, so another time (my mother would have stayed and even passed the alms brush).

The truth is that the road to Mekele takes all day in a car going up and down passes and if you have Alvaro and Chechu's conversation as the only distraction, the journey can seem endless if you haven't slashed your wrists first (no, I'm joking). I'm lucky to have a great inner life to be able to abstract myself with my thoughts and stay in that state of sleepiness that is so similar to a deep coma.

In a stop along the way, this little girl needed exactly two seconds to win me over. I felt like bringing her home, if it hadn't been for her mother who kept her eye on her...

Not to be eaten?

Well, I'll continue with the story, which is nothing more than a literary device to make my readers, mainly female readers, believe that I have a great tenderness and a heart that doesn't fit in my body.

I was telling you that we were going to the Mekele area to see the Coptic churches of Gera'Alta, in the heart of the Tigray Mountains. There are many more churches here, more than 100 and older than in Lalibela, but of all of them, I recommend going to see the one in Abuna Yemata (mainly because it is the only one I know, and we didn't have time for more).

Reaching it is not for everyone, the path is demanding and will test your physical and mental endurance. In a constant challenge to death you will have to walk through inhospitable territory, climb and climb vertical walls and walk along open paths between dizzying abysses before reaching the church of Abuna Yemata, located at the gates of a precipice of haunting beauty (in English dramatic and breathtaking).

And what I have written in the previous paragraph is nothing more than hyperbole, another literary device consisting of doing something that any neighbour would do and presenting it as if it had been an incredible adventure, in other words, an exaggeration. It has the particularity that hyperbole tends to increase in geometric progression with the number of times something has been counted or the number of drinks drunk. And it knows no limits...

But what is true is that Abuna Yemata will not leave you indifferent, it is very likely to be a bit scary and the height is considerable. However, the height doesn't matter, because as we used to say about skydivers, in the case of a fall from a height, what hurts the most is the last centimetre.

And with this I leave you for today. I already warned that the photos were not very good. It is the research I have carried out and the information provided that gives this article a special value.