This Christmas season brings new hope with the roll-out of vaccines and the dawn of a new year. It is a time of faith, and reminded us of Lalibela, a monument of rare devotion. 800 years ago, an Ethiopian king ordered a new capital for Christians. On the central plateau of Ethiopia there are eleven churches, each carved from one gigantic block of stone. No bricks, no mortar, no concrete, no lumber – just architectural stones. As we first told you last Christmas, not much is known about who built them or how. But the believers of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church say there is really no mystery. Lalibela’s churches were built by angels.
Ethiopia’s northern highlands were created 31 million years ago when cracks in the earth engulfed the Horn of Africa a mile deep with lava. On slopes you can still see columns of lava frozen in time. Iron made the basalt red, and the gases it contained made the stone light, as light and pliable as air. Christians left their mark on Ethiopia before the year 400. They found that the ancient stone welcomed the bite of a chisel. The churches were carved out around the year 1200 by people called the Zagwe.
Their king, Lalibela, is said to have traveled 1,600 miles to Jerusalem. According to legend, when he returned and Jerusalem fell to the Muslim conquest, Lalibela ordered a new home for Christianity.
Fasil Giorghis: And he came back with an ambitious idea, a vision to create an African Jerusalem, a black Jerusalem here in the highlands of Ethiopia.
Fasil Giorghis is an Ethiopian architect and historian who guided us through the rock of the ages.
Fasil Giorghis: Well, there are three groups of churches and each group is connected within itself.
Scott Pelley: We are in Saint Mary’s Church. How is it built?
Fasil Giorghis: Well, it was built from the outside. They formed the shape. And then they start digging or digging down.
Scott Pelley: So they basically dug a ditch around the entire perimeter leaving them with a giant cube of solid rock.
Fasil Giorghis: Yes. Exactly.
Scott Pelley: And then they carved their doors and went in?
Fasil Giorghis: They went in.
Inside, largely in darkness, artists sculpted many rooms with no room for error. Arches, vaults and columns imitate traditional construction, although in solid rock it is not necessary to hold the ceiling up. The enduring mystery is why. Why did King Lalibela try the seemingly impossible when easier construction techniques were known?
Scott Pelley: As the story goes, he was helped by angels.
Easy Giorghis: Yes.
Scott Pelley: Who worked on the project from one day to the next.
Fasil Giorghis: I think I’d rather take this as a symbolic thing because–
Scott Pelley: Don’t you have any experience working with angels in architecture?
Fasil Giorghis: Well, I get inspiration from angels.
The site of the 11 churches covers approximately 62 hectares. It is separated by a stream that King Lalibela baptized, the Jordan River. The largest church covers about 8,000 square meters, each about four stories high. But their most amazing dimension cannot be measured. It is the length to which they evoke worship.
Fasil Giorghis: This is considered a holy place, that coming here as a devout Christian is a very strong sign of their faith. Some people travel hundreds of miles to get here on foot. On foot. And they have been doing it for several centuries.
The churches are open for worship year round, but we were there on Christmas Eve when nearly 200,000 pilgrims ascended to heaven on a path that descended to earth. Many walked for days or weeks, fasting, dressed in white – a trial that is washed away from the disciples in the tradition of Jesus. Every Ethiopian over the age of 30 cannot forget the suffering of drought and war and a million people lost to starvation. And because they have known poverty in this life, they have invested their souls in the next.
Tewede Yigzaw told us, “I believe God is here. I came with faith.” Her neighbor, Getaye Abebeaw and his daughter told us they walked from their farms nearly 100 miles away, a three-day journey.
Scott Pelley: God can hear your prayers everywhere. Why did you think you should be here?
Tewede Yigzaw (translation): “So God can see our devotion,” she said, “and our devotion.”
Getaye Abebeaw (Translation): “We were very tired,” he said, “we fell and got up again on the journey, all to see the celebration here. And God will recognize our effort.”
The Christmas celebration that Ethiopians call Genna, she compresses shoulder to shoulder to fast and sing and praise all night long until dawn brings Christmas Day. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church claims to be one of the first capitals of Christianity thanks to a mysterious figure from the Hebrew Bible.
Believers believe that the Queen of Sheba left Ethiopia, went to Jerusalem, where she met King Solomon. From that meeting came a son, and when the son was grown, he returned to Ethiopia with 12,000 Israelites and the ark of the covenant, containing the tablets with the word of God, the 10 commandments.
And the ark, according to the priests of the Orthodox Church, remains in Ethiopia. We met Tsigie Selassie Mezgebu, the chief priest of Lalibela at the Church of St. George, which was the last to be built and judged as the masterpiece.
Scott Pelley: I met a woman on Christmas Day who had walked here for three days. Who are these pilgrims?
Tsigie Selassie Mezgebu (translation): “These are believers,” he told us, “not just three days, sometimes even three months. If there were no air travel or buses, people traveled for months from different parts of the country to get here. and celebrate with us. “
The celebration beats to the rhythm of old instruments; the two-headed kebero drum and a rattle called the sistrum, the sound of which was known in North Africa 3000 years before Jesus.
Scott Pelley: On Christmas Eve, we saw you and your priests singing all night long. What do you say in that song?
Tsigie Selassie Mezgebu (Translation): “We tell the people that God became man and man became God. Because of Christ, we went from the punishment of God to be His children again. Christmas is the day that forgiveness was born.”
But while God forgives, time doesn’t. After eight centuries, the basaltic basilicas are tired of wind and water.
Stephen Battle: What is absolutely clear is that something very wonderful has happened here.
Stephen Battle is an architect with the World Monuments Fund who told us that the wonder of Lalibela is undermined because the rock is not rock solid.
Stephen Battle: When you build a conventional building, you go to a quarry and you have different types of stone. And you try to select the best stone. You leave the bad things behind. If you carve a church out of the mountainside, you don’t have that luxury. And so, typically, in one of the churches here, you get good stone. And a lot of it is good stone. But then you also get really bad stone and actually very bad stone, which is very soft indeed. And over time, if you touch it, it even crumbles.
Simon Warrack: And this is one of the most sacred parts of Lalibela.
We saw the good and the bad in the room where King Lalibela was buried.
Scott Pelley: This is one of the best preserved sculptures I’ve seen in Lalibela.
Simon Warrack: Yes. This is very beautiful. And they are also painted.
Simon Warrack is a master stonemason, also with the World Monuments Fund, a US-based charity that preserves some of humanity’s great achievements.
Warrack has repaired European cathedrals and Roman antiquities. But Lalibela is more complicated because of the sincere belief that angels worked this stone.
Scott Pelley: Simon, you can’t actually cut this stone to fit a new piece into it, because the stone you would cut is sacred.
Simon Warrack: Yes, this was one of the first big problems I ran into. If we ever had to drill a hole to reinforce it and put a pin in it, we had to discuss it with the priests. They collected the dust. There was a whole process of touching the fabric of the church.
Scott Pelley: The priests have collected the dust?
Simon Warrack: Yes, yes.
That was the problem when Warrack was asked to bring the cross back to life in a window without disturbing the fragment that was left.
Scott Pelley: So this cross was not there.
Simon Warrack: This was completely gone, yes. It was still a very thin piece of stone.
Simon Warrack: So I hollowed out the back of the cross shape that we were inserting so it fit over the original stone, kind of like a dentist. And so we were able to keep this little piece of stone, which, in terms of brick masonry, is crazy. But you have to do that in situations like this.
There have been other crazy conservation ideas. A decade ago, five umbrellas were built to keep the sky from pouring down.
Stephen Battle: Locals call them gas station roofs. And I think it’s a pretty suitable way to describe them. So you can imagine that we have this extraordinary site with some of the most beautiful buildings in the world with extraordinary, enormous, spiritual significance. And there are a lot of gas station roofs placed over it. It’s really not compatible, it’s not appropriate.
Unholy to behold, the roofs became a lesson in the law of unintended consequences. The churches were too wet, now they are too dry.
Scott Pelley: For the first time in 900 years it hasn’t been rained on.
Stephen Battle: Just right. And so the stone contracts much more than ever before. And what happens is that at the micro level, this causes minor glitches and the stone starts to crumble.
The roofs were intended to be temporary and must be repaired within a few years. Stephen Battle prays that they will be removed entirely and replaced with intensive maintenance. To this end, the World Heritage Fund is teaching dozens of Lalibela’s priests and lay people to conserve nature in the hope that a host can protect the heavenly for centuries to come.
Scott Pelley: How long can they last?
Stephen Battle: Well, another 900 years, if they are properly cared for. Oh yes, absolutely without a doubt, if they are properly cared for.
Even after another millennia, we probably won’t know for sure the answer to why. Why try what seemed impossible? No answer was clear until we got away from what we saw Christmas Day. In the Old Testament, Isaiah advises those who seek God, “Look at the rock from which you were cut and the quarry from which you were cut.” Whoever cut this rock, angel or man, understood that faith is never washed away in the presence of a miracle.
Produced by Nicole Young. Associate producer, Katie Kerbstat. Broadcaster, Ian Flickinger.