This Christmas season brings new hope with the deployment of vaccines and the emergence of a new year. Is a time of faith, and reminded us of Lalibela, a monument to rare devotion. 800 years ago, an Ethiopian king ordered a new capital for Christians. On the central plateau of Ethiopia are eleven churches, each sculpted from a giant block of stone. No bricks, no mortar, no concrete, no wood, just rock sculpted in architecture. As we first told you last Christmas, not much is known about who built them or how. But the faithful of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church say there is really no mystery. The churches of Lalibela were built by angels.
The highlands of northern Ethiopia increased 31 million years ago when cracks in the earth flooded the Horn of Africa with one-kilometer-deep lava. On the slopes of the hills you can still see columns of lava frozen over time. Iron made the basalt red and the gases trapped inside made the stone as light and flexible 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 sculpted around the year 1200 by people called Zagwe.
Its king, Lalibela, is said to have traveled 1,600 miles to Jerusalem. Legend has it that when he returned and Jerusalem fell to the Islamic 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 traversed the rock of the centuries.
Easy Giorghis: Well, there are three groups of churches and each group is interconnected within it.
Scott Pelley: We’re sitting in St. Mary’s Church. How was it built?
Easy Giorghis: Well, it was built from the outside. They formed the form. And then they start digging or digging down.
Scott Pelley: So they essentially dug a ditch around the entire perimeter which left them a giant cube of solid rock.
Easy Giorghis: Yes. Exactly.
Scott Pelley: And then they slammed the doors and walked in?
Easy Giorghis: They went there.
Making chips inside, largely in the dark, the artists sculpted many rooms with no margin for error. Arches, vaults and columns mimic the traditional construction although, on solid rock, it is not necessary to raise the roof. The enduring mystery is why. Why did King Lalibela try the seemingly impossible when easier construction techniques were known?
Scott Pelley: According to the story, he was helped by angels.
Easy Giorghis: Yes.
Scott Pelley: Who worked on the project overnight.
Fasil Giorghis: I think I would prefer to take this as something symbolic because …
Scott Pelley: Don’t have experience working with angels in architecture?
Easy Giorghis: Well, I am inspired by angels.
The site of the eleven churches covers approximately 62 acres. It is divided by a stream baptized by King Lalibela, the Jordan River. The largest church covers about 8,000 square feet, each about four stories high. But its most striking dimension cannot be measured. It is the length at which they summon worship.
Fasil Giorghis: It is considered a sacred place, that coming here as a Christian devotee is a very strong sign of his belief. Some people travel hundreds of miles to get here on foot. By foot. And they have been doing so for several centuries.
Churches are open for worship year-round, but we were there on Christmas Eve when about 200,000 pilgrims ascended to heaven by a path that descended to earth. Many walked for days or weeks, fasting, dressed in white, a calvary that was washed away from the disciples according to the tradition of Jesus. Any Ethiopian, over 30, cannot forget the suffering of drought and war and a million people lost to hunger. And so, having known poverty in this life, they have invested their soul in the next.
Tewede Yigzaw told us, “I believe God is here. I have come in faith.” His neighbor, Getaye Abebeaw, and his daughter told us they walked from their farms nearly 100 miles away, a three-day trip.
Scott Pelley: God can hear your prayers anywhere. Why did you feel you had to be here?
Tewede Yigzaw (Translation): “So that God may see our devotion,” he said, “and our dedication.”
Getaye Abebeaw (Translation): “We were very tired,” he said, “we were falling and coming back up along the journey, all to see the celebration here. And God will recognize our effort.”
The Christmas celebration that Ethiopians call Genna compresses them, shoulder to shoulder, for fasting and singing and praising all night until dawn causes Christmas day. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church claims to be among the first capitals of Christianity thanks to a mysterious figure in the Hebrew Bible.
The faithful believe that the queen of Sheba left Ethiopia and went to Jerusalem where she met King Solomon. From that meeting came a son and, when the son was an adult, he returned to Ethiopia with 12,000 Israelites and the Ark of the Covenant, which contained the tablets with the word of God, the 10 commandments.
And the Ark remains in Ethiopia, according to the priests of the Orthodox Church. We met Tsigie Selassie Mezgebu, the chaplain of Lalibela in St. George’s Church, which was last built and judged as the masterpiece.
Scott Pelley: I met a woman on Christmas Day who had spent three days walking here. Who are these pilgrims?
Tsigie Selassie Mezgebu (Translation): “These are believers,” he told us, “not just three days, even three months sometimes. When there were no air travel or buses, people used to travel from various parts of the country. for months, come here and celebrate with us. “
The celebration beats to the beat of ancient instruments; the double-headed kebero drum and a rattle called sistrum, the sound of which was known in North Africa 3,000 years before Jesus.
Scott Pelley: On Christmas night, we saw you and your priests lead the song all night. What do you say in this song?
Tsigie Selassie Mezgebu (Translation): “We tell people that God became human and that a human being became God. Because of Christ, we went from being punished by God to being His children again. Christmas is the day forgiveness was born. ”
But even though God forgives, time does not. After eight centuries, basaltic basilicas are tired of wind and water.
Stephen Battle: What is absolutely clear is that something quite miraculous happened here.
Stephen Battle is a World Monuments Fund architect who told us that the miracle of Lalibela is being undermined because the rock is not solid.
Stephen Battle: When you’re building a conventional building, you go to a quarry and you have different grades of stone. And try to select the best stone. Leave the bad things behind. When you cut a church off the mountain, you don’t have that luxury. And so, normally, in any of the churches here, a good stone is obtained. And much of it is good stone. But then you also get a bad stone and a very bad stone, which is really very soft. And over time, if you touch it, it actually collapses.
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 is.
Scott Pelley: This is one of the best preserved sculptures I have seen in Lalibela.
Simon Warrack: Yes. This is particularly nice. And they are also painted.
Simon Warrack is also a master builder with the World Monuments Fund, a charity based in the United States that preserves some of humanity’s greatest achievements.
Warrack has repaired European cathedrals and Roman antiquities. But Lalibela is further complicated by the sincere belief that the angels worked this stone.
Scott Pelley: Simon, you can’t really cut this stone to fit a new piece, because the stone you would cut would be sacred.
Simon Warrack: Yeah, that was one of the first big problems I came across. If we ever had to make a hole to strengthen it to put a pin in it, we had to talk to the priests. They collected the dust. There was a whole procedure around touching the church cloth.
Scott Pelley: Did the priests collect the dust?
Simon Warrack: Yes, yes.
This was the problem when Warrack was asked to resurrect the cross in a window without disturbing the remaining fragment.
Scott Pelley: So that cross wasn’t here.
Simon Warrack: That no longer existed, yes. There was a very thin piece of stone left.
Simon Warrack: So I emptied the back of the cross shape we were inserting, so it fit on the original stone, kind of like a dentist. And so we were able to preserve this little piece of stone, which is, in terms of stone masonry, madness. But it needs to be done in these kinds of situations.
There have been other crazy conservation ideas. Five umbrellas were built a dozen years ago to keep the sky from pouring.
Stephen Battle: Local people call them gas station roofs. And I think it’s a very appropriate way to describe them. So you can imagine, we have this extraordinary place with some of the most beautiful buildings in the world with an extraordinary, huge spiritual significance. And there are a lot of gas station ceilings that have been placed on top. It really isn’t compatible, it’s not appropriate.
Of course, rooftops 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’s not raining.
Stephen Battle: Exactly right. And so the stone contracts much more than it had ever done. And what happens is that this creates small faults at a micro level and the stone starts to crumble.
The roofs had to be temporary and in a few years they had to be restored. Stephen Battle prays that they be completely removed and replaced by intensive maintenance. To this end, the World Monuments Fund teaches conservation to dozens of Lalibela priests and lay people in the hope that a host may protect the celestial perhaps for centuries to come.
Scott Pelley: How long can they last?
Stephen Battle: Well 900 more years, if properly cared for. Oh, yes, far beyond the shadow of a doubt, absolutely, if handled properly.
Even beyond another millennium, we probably don’t know for sure the answer to why. Why try what must have seemed impossible? No response was seen until we saw Christmas Day. In the Old Testament, Isaiah advises those who seek God to “look at the rock from which they were cut and the quarry from which they were cut.” Whoever cut this rock, neither the angels nor man, understood that in the presence of a miracle, faith is never erased.
Produced by Nicole Young. Associate producer, Katie Kerbstat. Associate of the station, Ian Flickinger.