Saturday, January 28, 2006
The St George Church at Lalibela
St George’s Church at Lalibela is an interesting structure. We had driven past it a couple of times without even seeing it. You have to look very hard to see it from the road, even if you know that it’s there. The reason for this is that it is, like the rest of the historic churches at Lalibela, they are carved into the rock, and are below ground level.The churches (11 of them in all) were built over a 25 year period in the 13th century by King Lalibela. The churches are located in an area within the town centre and it is only a few hundred metres at most to go from church to church. There are 3 types of churches built into the red sandstone:
Churches made of stone and built inside a natural cave (Makina Medhane Alem and Yemrehanna Krestos), Churches cut from a near vertical cliff face and using a natural cave (Abba Libanos in Lalibela).Churches cut in one piece from the rock and separated from it all round by a trench (Bet Medhane Alem, Bet Maryam. Bet Giorgis, and others).
The churches are all still used today, and whilst we were there we caught the tail end of one of the services. The church was crowded and we headed for the only space we could see. As it turns out, this was right in the middle of the church and we were thrust into the middle of the service, elbow to elbow with the priest incanting the lessons rather than up the back with the locals leaning on their sticks (in Orthodox churches there is no room for laziness as there are no seats and most remain standing for the two or three hour service with only a shoulder height stick to lean on). The churches have music and the beat of the drum throughout the service, with the prayers spoken in Amharic language. Burning frankinsense adds to the atmosphere. At the end of the service we move through to the other end of the church to have a look in the next room, but we were quickly blocked from entering… no women were allowed in that church.
One of the amazing things that I found was that the so-called historical artifacts were so little preserved. On one hand you were’nt allowed to take photographs with a flash so as not to damage the frescos, and on the other there were fluorescent lights shining on the same said frescos 24 hours a day! Not to mention the apparently 900 year old painting in St George’s church that had a chair and an umbrella leaning against it, and the wooden trunk with a modern metal lock that had just been fitted. Were these really the original artifacts?As we explored around Lalibela, we quickly realised that we had the company of our fellow countrymen in another party around town. Ernie Dingo and his The Great Outdoors crew were also filming a new episode in Lalibela at the same time we were there, and we seemed to follow them from site to site (even the airport on the day we left!). “They’re probably staying at our hotel…” I said … and sure enough they were. Ernie was in the room right next to us! Watch out for their Ethiopia episode in 2006!
// posted by rachelle @ 4:15 PM 
