Carved Churches

A challenging start today but ultimately ended up being a great day. I had an 8:00 AM pickup scheduled to get to the airport in time for my 10:15 flight to Lalibela. The driver showed up at 8:45 AM. I was less than amused but I still made my flight.

The flight into Lalibela was on time and my local guide (Ayalew – Hidden Ethiopia Tours) was there on time with a driver. It’s about a 25 minute drive from the airport (at 1,800m) to the town of Lalibela (2,600m). The main draw of Lalibela is the stone carved churches with St. George being the most famous (and probably photogenic). Ayalew is currently completing an MA on the impacts of cyclical tourism in Lalibela and is very knowledgeable about the carved churches.

There are a dozen carved churches within the town and they are largely divided into two main clusters and then St. George as a single outlier. All of the churches are carved out of solid rock and were carved over a span of 20 to 30 years during the 13th century. Depending on which story you choose to believe, either King Lalibela carved 25% of the churches with angels completing the other 75% at night. Or, King Lalibela hired people to perform the excavations under his supervision and in accordance with his designs. I’m leaning towards the latter.

Today we visited one of the clusters of five or six churches (depending on how you count) and St. George. We started with the largest of the churches Bete Medhane Alem (Savior of the World). And then moved on from there. I will try to add captions to the photos vs. trying to describe everything in text. We ended the day at St. George which is the youngest of the carved churches (and probably most famous).

The site is a UNESCO world heritage site and justifiably so. The protection you see in some of the photos was added in 2008 to mitigate damage from rainfall.

As always, the photos could have been better but…. This is actually one of the sites were a wide angle lens (or even my cell phone) would have been handy.