Gondar

Ethiopia's emperors had no fixed capital for centuries, moving between tented camps, until Fasilides chose Gondar as his royal camp in 1636 and began building in stone. His castle, with its round towers and battlements, was followed by the palaces, libraries, banqueting halls and stables of his successors within a walled compound of about seventy thousand square metres, the Fasil Ghebbi. The style that developed there mixed Ethiopian building traditions with ideas carried from Portugal, India and the Arab world, and it is known simply as Gondarine.

For more than two centuries the city was the political and religious centre of the empire, with a population estimated at more than 60,000 in the reign of Iyasu I, dozens of churches, a court and a trade in gold, ivory and coffee. Theological disputes within the Orthodox church were argued out here, and Empress Mentewab built her own palace and church at Kuskuam on the hill above. Decline set in during the Zemene Mesafint, the Era of the Princes, when regional lords held real power and the emperors in Gondar became figureheads.

The court withdrew in the 19th century and the city was sacked more than once; some observers put its population at only about 8,000 by the 1870s. Italian troops occupied Gondar without a fight on 1 April 1936 and laid out the piazza, a retail district in 1930s modernist style beside the castle compound; British and Italian forces fought here from 13 to 17 November 1941, in the last withdrawal of Italian forces from Italian East Africa. The compound was inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 1979. Gondar grew again in the later 20th century around its university and its trade, and has been affected by the fighting in Amhara since 2023.

Gondar thinks of itself as the keeper of Ethiopian court culture. The Gondarine style in architecture has a counterpart in painting: the church of Debre Berhan Selassie, with its ceiling of winged angel faces looking down on the congregation, is the best-known survival of a school of religious art that spread from the city. Illuminated manuscripts, hand crosses and the sung liturgy in Ge'ez are all part of the same inheritance.

Timkat is the city's defining event. The tabots are carried from the churches in procession to Fasilides' Bath, the pool is filled for the occasion, and at dawn the water is blessed and the crowd enters it, before the tabots are escorted back with drumming, chanting and dancing. Genna, Meskel and Fasika fill the churches at other points of the year, and in August girls and young women mark Ashendeye with singing, drumming and grass skirts.

Gondar was also, for centuries, a centre of the Beta Israel, the Ethiopian Jewish community, whose villages lay around the city and whose craftspeople were known for pottery and metalwork; most emigrated to Israel in airlifts in the 1980s and 1990s. The azmari, a singer accompanying himself on the one-stringed masenqo, remains a fixture of the city's bars, improvising verses that praise and mock the people in the room.

Gondar had an estimated population of 443,156 in 2021, making it one of the largest cities in the Amhara region. People live in a mix of old stone and mud houses on the ridges near the centre, tin-roofed compounds down the slopes, and newer blocks of flats along the wider roads out towards Azezo and the airport. Amharic is the language of the street, and the Orthodox church, with a Muslim minority of long standing, shapes the week.

The economy rests on trade, government, the university and its teaching hospital, which is one of the largest medical centres in northern Ethiopia, and on the farmland around the city, which grows teff, barley, oilseeds and chillies. Tourism was a major employer for two decades — hotels, guides, drivers and craft workshops — and lost most of its business during the conflicts of the 2020s.

Days begin early with church bells and chanting, the bajaj taxis fill the streets by seven, and business stops for the long afternoon coffee. Market days bring farmers and livestock in from the highlands. The conflict in Amhara has brought displaced families into the city, along with periods of closed roads, curfews and interrupted banking and internet services, and food and fuel prices have risen sharply with national inflation.

Gondar eats the classic highland diet, built on injera made from teff and a rotation of stews. Doro wat, the chicken stew cooked with berbere and served with a hard-boiled egg, is the feast dish; tibs, cubes of lamb or beef fried with onion and chilli, is what is ordered when there is something to celebrate; and kitfo, minced beef warmed with spiced butter and the chilli blend mitmita, is eaten raw or lightly cooked. Raw beef, tere siga, cut from a carcass hanging in a butcher's shop and eaten with mustard and awaze sauce, has a particular following in the northern cities.

Fasting days, which cover most Wednesdays and Fridays and the long seasons of Lent and Advent, bring beyaynetu, a platter of shiro, lentils, split peas, cabbage, greens and beetroot arranged in small mounds on injera. Chickpea shiro from the surrounding farmland is a staple, and the hot, thin porridge genfo is a breakfast of the highlands.

Italian influence is still visible in the Piazza's cafés, where macchiato, pasta and layered lasagne appear beside Ethiopian dishes. To drink there is tej, the honey wine served in a berele, tella, the barley beer brewed at home with gesho, and coffee roasted, ground and brewed in a jebena as the centre of the afternoon.