Lalibela

The town was called Roha before it took the name of the king who made it famous. After the kingdom of Aksum declined, power in the Christian highlands passed to the Zagwe dynasty, which ruled from the mountains of Lasta, and under King Gebre Mesqel Lalibela in the late 12th and early 13th centuries a group of churches was cut downwards into the soft red volcanic rock of the ridge. Tradition holds that the king intended a new Jerusalem in the mountains after pilgrimage to the Holy Land became difficult, and the small river running between the two main groups of churches is called the Jordan.

The Zagwe were replaced in 1270 by the Solomonic emperors, but Lalibela kept its standing as a religious centre and a place of pilgrimage. The Portuguese priest Francisco Álvares, travelling with an embassy in the 1520s, described the churches for European readers and wrote that he feared he would not be believed. For centuries afterwards the town remained a remote highland settlement of priests, deacons and farmers, reached only on foot or by mule.

The churches were inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1978, and an airstrip, a road and a steady flow of visitors followed, making tourism the town's main industry. That trade collapsed with the conflict of the 2020s: the town was taken by Tigrayan forces in August 2021 and changed hands several times again that December during the Tigray war, and the region has seen fighting between federal forces and Fano militias since 2023, including fierce fighting in the town in November 2023.

Lalibela is one of the great centres of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, and its life is organised around the liturgy. Services are sung in Ge'ez, the ancient language of Aksum, accompanied by drums, sistra and prayer staffs, and clergy in embroidered robes carry processional crosses and umbrellas in the open courtyards cut around the churches. Church schools teach chant, scripture and manuscript writing much as they have for centuries, and hermits still occupy caves in the cliffs around the town.

The festivals are the year's fixed points. At Genna, Orthodox Christmas on 7 January, pilgrims in white cotton shamma robes arrive on foot from across the highlands, many walking for days, and fill the trenches and rock ledges above Bete Giyorgis for services that run through the night. Timkat on 19 January brings the tabot, a replica of the Tablets of the Law, out of each church in procession, and Meskel at the end of September marks the end of the rains with bonfires.

Handicrafts follow the church: hand crosses in wood, brass and silver, painted parchment icons and illuminated manuscripts are made and sold in the town. Musicians known as azmari improvise sung verses in the drinking houses, and the coffee ceremony, with its charcoal roasting, incense and three rounds of small cups, is the standard form of welcome in a home.

Lalibela had 17,367 residents at the 2007 national census, spread across a slope at about 2,500 metres with the church precinct at its centre. Round stone houses with conical thatched roofs, some of them two storeys high in a local style, stand alongside newer tin-roofed buildings, and the surrounding countryside is farmed in narrow terraces of barley, teff and wheat, with cattle, sheep and goats grazing the stony ground.

For two decades before the conflicts, tourism was the town's main employer: guides, drivers, hotel staff, weavers and souvenir sellers all depended on the flow of visitors, and Lalibela grew quickly on that trade. The fighting in Amhara since 2023, and the fighting of 2021 before it, cut visitor numbers sharply, and many of those jobs disappeared. Farming, the church, government offices and the market carry much of what is left of the local economy.

The rhythm of the day is early. Chanting from the churches begins well before dawn, farmers walk into town for the market with grain and livestock, and by mid afternoon the heat has gone out of the sun and the coffee houses fill. Water supply, electricity and internet service are unreliable, and the altitude keeps nights cold enough for a fire or a heavy blanket for most of the year.

The food is highland Amhara cooking. Injera, the wide, sour pancake fermented from teff flour, is the plate and the cutlery: stews are ladled onto it and torn pieces are used to scoop them up. Doro wat, chicken slow-cooked with hard-boiled egg in a thick sauce of the berbere chilli blend and spiced butter, is the dish of feast days, and tibs, meat sautéed with onion, rosemary and chilli, is the everyday celebration.

Because the Orthodox calendar imposes fasting on most Wednesdays and Fridays and through long seasons such as Lent, plant-based food is on every menu. Beyaynetu is the standard fasting platter: small mounds of shiro, a purée of ground chickpeas or broad beans, alongside lentils, split peas, cooked greens, cabbage and beetroot. Kolo, roasted barley grains, and dabo kolo, small crunchy nuggets of spiced dough, are the snacks carried on a journey.

Drinks are as traditional as the food. Tej, a honey wine made stronger or sweeter according to the house, is drunk from a rounded flask called a berele; tella is the cloudy home-brewed barley beer flavoured with gesho leaves. Coffee, grown in the south but ceremonial everywhere, is roasted, ground and brewed in a clay jebena and served in three rounds, sometimes with salt or butter in the highland manner and often with popcorn or roasted barley alongside.