This month's World Heritage Site

Lalibela Rock Temples of Ethiopia

By Levent Totty Posted on Adventure

Jordan’s Petra, “a rose-red city, half as old as time,” is the image that comes to most travelers’ minds when you say “rock-hewn structures.” The incredible patience and skill of the Nabateans, a third century B.C. nomadic people, in carving out Petra’s pediments, pillars and interior spaces still amaze. 

But there are other red places, even more remote than the Jordanian desert, where people have carved elaborate buildings from rock. One of them is at Lalibela, a small town at almost 9,000 feet in the Ethiopian highlands. Here in the 13th century devout Christians began carving into red volcanic rock to create 13 churches hewn from stone. Four of them were finished as completely freestanding structures, attached to their mother rock only at their bases. The remaining nine range from semi-detached to ones whose facades are the only features that have been "liberated" from the rock.

All agree that a king named Lalibela commissioned the structures, but after that disagree as to his motivation. Legends have it that Lalibela was poisoned by his brother and fell into a three-day coma in which he was taken to Heaven and given a vision of rock-hewn cities. Another legend says he visited Jerusalem and vowed that when he returned he would create a New Jerusalem.

The Jerusalem theme is important. The rock churches, though connected to one another by maze-like tunnels, are physically separated by a small river that the Ethiopians named the Jordan. Churches on one side of the Jordan represent the earthly Jerusalem, while those on the other side represent the heavenly Jerusalem, the city of jewels and golden sidewalks hinted at in the Bible.

The names of the churches evoke hints of Hebrew, a language related to the Hamo-Semitic dialect still used in Ethiopian church liturgies: "Beta Medhane Alem" (the House of the Savior of the World), "Beta Qedus Mikael" (the House of St. Michael), "Beta Amanuel" (the House of Emmanuel) all remind readers of the Hebrew "beth," house.

Other legends say that King Lalibela's vision took only 24 years to emerge from the rock. But given the scope of the project, as well as the exquisite sculptural retailing on all of the churches' facades and interiors, it's likely that the project spanned centuries. 

UNESCO named the churches to its World Heritage List in 1978.