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| The St. George church in Lalibela, dedicated to Ethiopia’s patron saint, is one of 11 Ethiopian Orthodox churches that were carved out of the rock in the 13th century and are literally anchored in the earth. |
ON the roads through Ethiopia’s highlands traffic raises a
brick-red haze that coats your clothes, powders your skin and starts a creaking
in your lungs. Despite the dust people wear white. Farmers wrap themselves in
bleached cotton. Village funerals look like fields of snow. At churches and
shrines white is the pilgrim’s color.
I wear it too, protectively: long-sleeved white shirt,
tennis cap, Neutrogena sun block. A pilgrim? Why not?
I’m here for something I’ve longed to see, Ethiopia’s holy
cities: Aksum, the spiritual home of this east African country’s Orthodox
Christian faith and, especially, the mountain town of Lalibela, with its
cluster of 13th-century churches some 200 miles to the south.
Lalibela was conceived as a paradise on earth. And its 11
churches, cut from living volcanic rock, are literally anchored in the earth.
In scale, number, and variety of form there’s no architecture or sculpture
quite like them anywhere. They’re on the global tourist route now, though
barely. To Ethiopian devotees they’ve been spiritual lodestars for eight
centuries, and continue to be.
Heaven seekers and art seekers are, in some ways, kindred
souls, impelled to spend precious time and travel mad distances in search of
places and things that will, somehow, fill them up, complete them. For the
religious, pilgrimage is a dress rehearsal for salvation. For the art seeker,
it can transform a wish list of experiences into a catalog of permanent, extended,
relivable memories. But why do art seekers go to the particular places and
things they do? This is a personal matter; complicated, with roots in the past.
As an American teenager in the early 1960s I sensed Africa
all around me, secondhand. African independence was on the evening news; names
like Lumumba, Nkrumah and Senghor chanted by jubilant crowds. “Civil rights”
was turning into “black power,” with preachers in suits replaced by Huey Newton
holding a spear in one hand, a shotgun in the other.
In college I took an anthropology course called “Primitive
Art.” It met in an ethnological museum that had a collection of masks from West
and Central Africa. I loved them instantly, these things made for dancing,
healing, telling stories, changing identities. They looked old but felt new. I
wanted to go to where they came from.
But not ready yet, I went that first college summer to
Europe, where I dashed through countless museums in 15 countries before ending
up in Istanbul. Again, love, immediate. One look at Byzantine art — the
lifting-off dome of Hagia Sophia, the Buddha-calm saints of the Chora mosaics —
confirmed what I had begun to suspect: my compass was not set westward.
At that point I didn’t yet know that Byzantium and
sub-Saharan Africa had once fruitfully intersected. I later learned, and that
intersection is what I’ve come to Ethiopia to see.
The history of Ethiopian culture is deep, going back — if
the national epic, the “Kebra Negast” or “Glory of Kings,” can be believed — to
at least the 10th century B.C., when an Ethiopian ruler, the biblical Queen of
Sheba, traveled to Jerusalem in search of the wisdom of Solomon. The two
monarchs met, bonded and had a son, Menelik, who would become Ethiopia’s first
emperor.
Solomon, the story goes, wanted to name Menelik as his heir.
But the young prince, with Africa on his mind, left Jerusalem behind. He did
not, however, leave empty-handed. Secretly he took with him the Ark of the
Covenant, which held the tablets given by God to Moses, and brought it to
Ethiopia, in effect, establishing a new Israel there.
History, if that’s what this is, then fades out for stretch,
until around 300 B.C., when a new empire coalesces in northern Ethiopia, with
the city of Aksum as its capital and a still-existing group of immense stone
stelae, carved with architectural features, as its grand monument. Another
fade-out. By the fourth century A.D. Ethiopia has become officially Christian,
and the Ark is in Aksum, enshrined in a cathedral named St. Mary of Zion, where
it remains.
Its presence makes Aksum the country’s holiest city, and St.
Mary of Zion its holiest shrine, though materially both have seen better days.
The town is a sketchy, low-rise place perched on a still barely tapped
archaeological site. The original cathedral was leveled by a Muslim army in the
16th century. Its modern replacement is a circular domed structure built by
Ethiopia’s last emperor, Haile Selassie, in the early 1960s.
It’s a curious thing. Its wide, unbroken interior has the
blank, functional ambience of a skating rink. And it doesn’t feel quite
finished, as final touches of some kind were still needed. On a day I visited
the church was closed to the public.
Benches were roughly lined up. Free-standing paintings of
the Virgin and saints, in a melty neo-Romantic style, leaned against walls.
Two men on a scaffold were working on, or perhaps touching
up, a mural.
A priest, in white, stood at a lectern and read aloud from
an illuminated book as a European video crew fussed with sound checks, then
asked him, please, to start again. To an outsider the general impression was
confusing, disconcerting. Can this newish, nondescript, somewhat disheveled,
in-progress space really be the physical and psychic center of one the world’s
oldest versions of Christianity?
The priest at the lectern burst into song, a long, gorgeous
melismatic chant that bloomed in the dome. Everyone stopped to listen,
enraptured. There was the answer. Yes, it can.
The evidence was even stronger outside. I was in Aksum just
before an important holy day dedicated to Mary, the object of acute devotional
focus in Ethiopian Orthodoxy. Pilgrims from far and near were already
gathering, camping out in the park around the cathedral, prostrating themselves
on its steps. A day later the city would be a sea of white, and St. Mary of
Zion would be open, full and finished. People were the completing ingredient.
By the 10th century A.D. the long-lived Aksumite empire,
once a rival to Persia and Rome, was out of steam, and the city itself a
backwater. New rulers, known now as the Zagwe dynasty, appeared. They retained
the distinctively Judaic form of Ethiopian Christianity, with its Saturday
Sabbath and practice of circumcision, and further promoted the concept of an
African Zion by giving it physical manifestation in a new capital city to the
south of Aksum.
The force behind the new city was the 13th-century Zagwe
emperor Lalibela, for whom the new capital eventually came to be named. He is
credited — and here we are again in a tangle of fact, fantasy and informed
surmise — with planning and creating the extraordinary group of 11 churches
there, all chiseled directly from sandstone cliffs and gorges, that exist at
Lalibela today.
According to legend the emperor himself, spelled by angels
on night shifts, did the work, wrapping the whole job up in 20-some years.
Whether or not the results can justifiably be called, as they often are, the
eighth wonder of the world, they are certainly wondrous. And sharing, as they
do, in a tradition of sculptured architecture that extends from Turkey to
China, they are indeed world-spanning.
They are also, however, a phenomenon apart. Although no
confirming scholarly study of Lalibela has yet appeared, there is reason to
think that the complex, which is divided into two groups of churches, was
envisioned as a mystical model of the holy city of Jerusalem in both its
earthly and heavenly forms, with each church filling a very specific symbolic
role within that topography.
One church, dedicated to St. George, Ethiopia’s patron
saint, stands apart from the others. Probably the latest of them, it is
meticulously executed and gives a clear sense of the labor-intense strangeness
of the whole endeavor.
Basically a monolithic, walk-in Greek cross, it’s
free-standing but set in a deep, square pit, so that your first view is,
angelically, from above looking down on a relief of three nested crosses cut
into the church’s flat roof. To reach the entrance, you descend into the
canyonlike excavation, into the earth. The church interior, dimly lighted by
high windows, has an organic, hand-molded texture. It’s as if it were shaped
from loam and you were a seed being planted.
Here too the impression of the interiors coming to life is
especially strong when they’re crowded with people.
On St. Gabriel’s day the Lalibela church dedicated to the
archangel who announced the birth of Jesus to Mary is open before dawn. The
sound of chanting, amplified by loudspeakers, pours out. Following a stream of
pilgrims, I go in.
The interior is tight. Lay worshippers are permitted only in
one section of it; a second area, closed off by a curtain, is reserved for
clergy members. A third, inner compartment holds, as all churches do, a version
of the Ark of the Covenant, and is off limits to almost everyone.
The service, continuous for hours, is diffuse but enfolding.
Priests and deacons are in a huddle in an alcove, beating drums, rattling
sistrums, doing a small-step, hopping dance, and breaking, now and then, into
Arabic-sounding ululation.
They face one another rather than the church or worshippers.
It’s as if, like certain rock bands, they’re jamming.
Nearby a single priest massages worshippers with a hand-held
brass cross; one bent-over man gets a full-body rubdown, one palsied woman a
prolonged pacifying touch. Another priest charges out from behind the sanctuary
holding flaming tapers straight out in front of him like wands or prods. A
third swings a silver censer in hazardous arcs in front of a painting: a modern
icon in an old style, of St. Gabriel with European features, Ethiopian skin,
and pooling Byzantine eyes.
The ceremonial choreography is all-over, ecstatic, sensually
overpowering. It’s the opposite of the face-the-altar focus of most western
Christian services, closer to the dynamic of masquerade dances in other parts
of Africa, performances that effortlessly combine spiritual efficacy and
spectacular entertainment.
To be in the middle of this is discomfiting — What’s my
role? What do I do? — then a release. Just stand there.
Time dissolves. There’s no reason to leave. Isn’t this what
you came here for? Then, some commotion, a fresh wave of pilgrims pushes in,
nudging the priests further into their alcove.
But these pilgrims are wearing slacks, and sport shirts and
sunhats. They’re middle-aged Europeans on tour. They were at the hotel last
night having dinner at a long table and watching the news in the lobby. There
must be close to 20 of them shouldering into what’s little more than a
scooped-out monk’s cell. They blink, bunch up, hesitate, not sure what’s going
on, where to look first. When in doubt, take a picture. Flash, flash.
They’re part of the Ethiopian present, which is part of the
African present, which, along with pilgrims, priests and video teams, is now,
at last, part of my present, just as it has always been, twice-removed; part of
my past. It’s reality, and it doesn’t stay still, any more than the pilgrim’s
desire stays still. I inch through the throng, out the narrow door and head
back down the red-dust road. The sound of chanting, ancient, amplified, follows
me to a waiting car.
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