Rock of ages | 19 September 2012

By any measure the small town of Lalibela, hidden away amongst the gorges and plateaux of Ethiopia’s central highlands, is one of the most remarkable religious sites on earth. A dozen or so churches have been carved out of the rock and connected by a labyrinth of trenches, tunnels, culverts and crypts. The churches are substantial, elaborate and in their overall effect unlike anything else in the Christian world. Interiors disappear into chiselled-out arcades and apses; the light falls through intricate cruciform windows. The columns are so evenly spaced, the vaults so regular that it is easy to forget that every inch of these ‘buildings’ had to be designed and executed using negative space, a stone-carver’s technique that allows for no margin of error.

The earliest eye-witness account of Lalibela comes from the 16th century when the Portuguese traveller Francisco Alvares attempted to describe them before confessing, ‘I weary of writing more about these buildings, because it seems to me that I shall not be believed.’ Visitors from Europe and elsewhere have continued to be astonished by Lalibela, and their astonishment has been expressed in the customary fashion, through eager questions about its origins: When? How? By whom? Why? The fact that none of these questions has ever been conclusively answered only adds to Lalibela’s mystique.

Jacques Mercier and Claude Lepage bring decades of experience and expertise in Ethiopian art to decoding Lalibela. With regard to dates, they back up the

Ethiopians are a bit miffed at the assumption that their ancestors couldn’t have achieved these wonders

hagiographic version, that the churches were commissioned by King Lalibela in the late 12th and early 13th centuries. This theory stands apart from the recent work of the Cambridge-based archaeologist David Phillipson who believes that, though some of the churches may come from the time of Lalibela, the ensemble was begun earlier.