This Christmas season brings a new hope with the vaccines that are unfolding and with a new year. It is a time of faith and reminded us of Lalibela, a monument of rare devotion. 800 years ago, an Ethiopian king ordered a new capital for Christians. There are 11 churches on the central plateau of Ethiopia, each carved from a single giant block of stone. No bricks, no mortar, no concrete, no lumber – just stone carved in architecture. As I told you for the first time last Christmas, not much is known about who built them or how. But believers in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church say there is no mystery. The churches in Lalibela were built by angels.
The northern mountains of Ethiopia rose 31 million years ago, when cracks in the earth flooded the Horn of Africa with lava a mile deep. On the slopes of the hills you can still see columns of lava frozen in time. The iron made the basalt red, and the gases trapped inside made the stone light, as light and flexible as the air. Christians left their mark on Ethiopia before the year 400. They discovered that the ancient stone received the bite of a chisel. The churches were carved around 1200 by people called Zagwe.
Their king, Lalibela, is said to have traveled 1,600 miles to Jerusalem. Legend has it that when Jerusalem returned and fell to the Islamic conquest, Lalibela ordered a new home for Christianity.
Fasil Giorghis: And he came back with an ambitious idea, a vision to create an African Jerusalem, a black Jerusalem here, in the highlands of Ethiopia.
Fasil Giorghis is an Ethiopian architect and historian who walked us through the cliffs of the ages.
Fasil Giorghis: Well, there are three groups of churches and each group is interconnected in itself.
Scott Pelley: We’re staying at Saint Mary’s Church. How was it built?
Easy Giorghis: Well, it was built from the outside. They formed the form. And then they start digging or digging down.
Scott Pelley: So they basically dug a ditch around the perimeter which left them with a huge cube of solid rock.
Easy Giorghis: Yes. Exact.
Scott Pelley: And then they sculpted their doors and came in?
Fasil Giorghis: They entered them.
Throwing inside, mostly in the dark, the artists sculpted many rooms with no room for error. The arches, vaults and columns imitate the traditional construction, although in solid rock, there is no need to support the ceiling. The enduring mystery is why. Why did King Lalibela try what seems impossible when lighter construction techniques were known?
Scott Pelley: As the story goes, he was helped by angels.
Slightly Giorghis: Yes.
Scott Pelley: Who worked on the project overnight.
Fasil Giorghis: I think I would prefer to take this as a symbolic thing because …
Scott Pelley: Don’t you have any experience working with angels in architecture?
Fasil Giorghis: Well, I’m inspired by angels.
The site of the 11 churches covers about 62 acres. It is divided by a stream named King Lalibela, the Jordan River. The largest church covers about 8,000 square meters, each is about four stories high. But their most astonishing size cannot be measured. It is the length at which he invokes adoration.
Fasil Giorghis: This is considered a holy place, that coming here as a devout Christian is a very strong sign of their faith. Some people travel hundreds of miles to get here on foot. On foot. And I’ve been doing it for centuries.
Churches are open for worship throughout the year, but I was there on Christmas Eve, when nearly 200,000 pilgrims ascended to heaven on a path that descends to earth. Many walked for days or weeks, fasting, dressed in white – an ordeal that is rinsed from the disciples in the tradition of Jesus. Any Ethiopian over the age of 30 cannot forget the suffering of drought and war and a million people lost to hunger. And so, after experiencing poverty in this life, they invested their souls in the next.
Tewede Yigzaw told us, “I think God is here. I came in faith. ” Her neighbor, Getaye Abebeaw, and her daughter told us they walked from their farms nearly 100 miles away on a three-day trip.
Scott Pelley: God can hear your prayers anywhere. Why did you feel you had to be here?
Tewede Yigzaw (Translation): “So that God can see our devotion,” she said, “and our dedication.”
Getaye Abebeaw (Translation): “We were very tired,” he said, “we would fall and get up all the way, all to see the holiday here. And God will recognize our effort. “
The Christmas holiday that Ethiopians call Genna compresses them, shoulder to shoulder, to fast and sing and praise all night until dawn brings Christmas Day. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church claims to be one of the first capitals of Christianity due to a mysterious figure in the Hebrew Bible.
Believers believe that the Queen of Sheba left Ethiopia and went to Jerusalem where she met King Solomon. From that meeting a son came and, when the son was an adult, he returned to Ethiopia with 12,000 Israelites and the Ark of the Covenant, which contains the tablets with the word of God, the 10 Commandments.
And the Ark remains in Ethiopia, according to the priests of the Orthodox Church. We met Tsigie Selassie Mezgebu, the high priest of Lalibela, at St. George’s Church, which was last built and judged to be a masterpiece.
Scott Pelley: I met a woman on Christmas Day who spent three days walking here. Who are these pilgrims?
Tsigie Selassie Mezgebu (Translation): “They are believers,” he told us, “Not just three days, sometimes even three months. to come here and celebrate with us. “
The feast beats to the rhythm of ancient instruments; the two-headed kebero drum and a rattle called a sistrum, the sound of which was known in North Africa 3,000 years before Jesus.
Scott Pelley: On Christmas Eve, I watched you and your priests lead the song all night. What do you say in that song?
Tsigie Selassie Mezgebu (Translation): “We tell people that God became man and a man became God. Because of Christ, we went from being punished by God to being His children again. Christmas is the day when forgiveness was born ”
But while God forgives, time does not. After eight centuries, basalt basilicas are tired of wind and water.
Stephen Battle: What is absolutely clear is that something quite miraculous happened here.
Stephen Battle is an architect with the World Monuments Fund, who told us that the miracle of Lalibela is undermined because the rock is not solid.
Stephen Battle: When you build a conventional building, you go to a quarry and you will have different degrees of stone. And try to select the best stone. Leave the bad things behind. When you carve a church outside the mountain, you don’t have that luxury. And so, as usual, in any of the churches here, you will get a good stone. And much of it is a good stone. But then you also get bad stone and in fact very bad stone, which is really very soft. And in time, if you touch it, it actually shatters.
Simon Warrack: And this is one of the most sacred parts of Lalibela.
I saw good and evil in the room where King Lalibela is resting.
Scott Pelley: This is one of the best preserved sculptures I’ve seen at Lalibela.
Simon Warrack: Yes. This is especially beautiful. And they are also painted.
Simon Warrack is also a master mason with the World Monuments Fund, a US charity that preserves some of humanity’s great achievements.
Warrack repaired European cathedrals and Roman antiquities. But Lalibela is more complicated because of the sincere belief that the angels worked this stone.
Scott Pelley: Simon, you can’t cut this stone to frame a new piece, because the stone you cut is sacred.
Simon Warrack: Yes, that was one of the first big problems I encountered. If we ever had to drill a hole to strengthen it to put a pin in, we should talk to the priests. They gathered dust. It was a whole procedure around touching the fabric of the church.
Scott Pelley: Did the priests gather the dust?
Simon Warrack: Yes, yes.
This was the problem when Warrack was asked to revive the cross in a window, without disturbing the remaining fragment.
Scott Pelley: So this cross wasn’t here.
Simon Warrack: It’s completely gone, yes. A very thin piece of stone remained.
Simon Warrack: So I dug out the back of the cross shape I was inserting so that it would fit over the original stone, much like a dentist. So we managed to preserve this little piece of stone, which is, in terms of stone masonry, crazy. But you have to do that in this kind of situation.
There were other crazy conservation ideas. A dozen years ago, five umbrellas were built to prevent the sky from overflowing.
Stephen Battle: The locals call them gas station roofs. And I think that’s a pretty good way to describe them. You can imagine that we have this extraordinary site with some of the most beautiful buildings in the world with an extraordinary, immense, spiritual significance. And there are a lot of gas station roofs that have been placed on top of them. It really is not compatible, it is not suitable.
Unthinkably, roofs have become a lesson in the law of unintended consequences. The churches were too wet, now they are too dry.
Scott Pelley: For the first time in 900 years, it’s not raining.
Stephen Battle: Exactly right. And so the stone contracts much more than it has done so far. And what happens is that this creates small failures at a small level and the stone starts to collapse.
The roofs were meant to be temporary and need to be recovered in a few years. Stephen Battle prays to be completely removed and replaced with intensive maintenance. To this end, the World Monuments Fund is learning to preserve dozens of priests and lay people in Lalibela in the hope that a host can probably protect the sky for centuries to come.
Scott Pelley: How long can I last?
Stephen Battle: Well, another 900 years, if properly cared for. Oh, yes, beyond the shadow of a doubt, absolutely, if they are cared for properly.
Even beyond other millennia, it is unlikely that we know for sure the answer to why. Why try what seems impossible? No answer was obvious until I got rid of what I saw at Christmas. In the Old Testament, Isaiah advises those who seek God to “look at the rock from which you were cut and the quarry from which you were cut.” Anyone who has cut this rock, angels or man, has understood that in the presence of a miracle, faith is never washed away.
Produced by Nicole Young. Associate producer, Katie Kerbstat. Broadcast Associate, Ian Flickinger.