The more that came!

The more that came!
Our third day in wukro, we headed for abreha Astebah. This is one of the great rock hewn churches. It’s plan is mimicked by many others in the region. The church was covered with beautiful paintings on the inside.


Abreha Astebah
Emmanuel, our expert guide arrived by plane on our third day in wukoro.
Driving back to wukro, we stopped at the ruins of a nameless axum church from the 4th century. As we walked around this basic frame, I began to get a taste for what the rest of this journey would be like. With just the outline of the walls remaining, he deciphered for me the probable structure of the building and its liturgical functioning. This has all been very reminiscent of an earlier journey I took through southern france examining the architecture of monasteries. There is an old phrase in the church that says lex orandi, lex credendi, which loosely means, as the church prays, the church believes. This maxim is preserved much more in practice in the eastern churches.


Miriam behera
It took us a long time to find the route to Miriam Behera. We asked a number of people, carried 3 separate guides in our car for short periods of time, turned around twice and forded a dry river.

This church is seldom visited by tourists, so the first thing they asked for was a letter of recommendation. We, of course, didn’t have one, so emmanuel took the lead in negotiating for us. When it was all said and done, we were given entrance to the church. We couldn’t have had better luck, however. The church was being renovated, so the tabot (the representation of the ark of the covenant) was out of the church and we were able to visit the entire church. This church, also hewn into the rock, was less exact than the other churches. Emmanuel dated it earliest at the 16th century, which, he explained, is practially just yesterday. There were excellent paintings covering the columns. In the process of “restoration”, a term I would use very loosely throughout Ethiopia, they had whitewashed the walls, and in the process, spotted and damaged these ancient paintings. There is, of course, a completle different frame of mind for those restoring the churches. These are living sites of worship, and so the concern for preserving the historical is not as present. Furthermore, there are certain ideas of what a church “should” look like and how it “should” be restoried. This often involves a lot of concrete and white paint. It could even involve complete demolition and the builidnig of something complelty new, which seemed all to common during the reign of Haille Selassie.
Even the altar, a product of the 17th or 18th century, was not spared. There was a section cut directly through the middle to create a more common altar, and in the process baby jesus was hewn right out of mary’s hands.

We spent over 3 hours in the church, measuring, photographing and exploring. More exciting for me was to see the interest that the Ethiopians there took in our little project as we raced around the room. Emmanuel and Phillips passion seemed contagious, as members of the church, joined us in trying to decipher ancient Ge’ez and search for the remenants of paintings no longer evident.

Degum
Finished with Miriam Behera, we traveled to a church much closer to wukro and much more familiar to emmanuel and phillip. Indeed, the priest greeted them as an old friend when he saw them. Degum is an ancient church of the 11th or 12 century. We were unable to step into the former part of the church, as the altar has been moved from its original place to what would have been the center of the nave. The priest was willing, however, to pull the curtain aside. Emmanuel at that point, clarified the liturgical function of the church.


Mikael barka
On our 4th day in Wukro, a Sunday, we took a chance and visited some more rock hewn churches. Typically a church is closed for an entire day after mass is held there. The tigray region is a particularly conservative region when it comes to such matters in religion so we feared the worst. To our fortune, however, the churches were open.
We were greeted at the first church by the guardian monk of mikael barka. He was unmoving in showing us what lies behind the curtains of the church, but he was otherwise a pleasant man. We once again played detective, as we found traces and remnants of more fuller paintings on the walls. I even did a split manouever between two pillars to catch a better picture of the potential dormition of mary.

Wukro christos
Wulkro christos was the last church we visited in wukro. When it’s floor was being restored, emmanuel and phillip flew up here and spent time examining all the different holes in the floor. These represented where things were changed or moved over the past 500 years. The church had, unfortunatley, suffered from a fire at some earlier point by a muslim warlord, but the sandstone carvings in wall and ceiling were exquisite. This church was by far the most vast of all the churches we visited.

Coming soon: On the road to axum, stylites and tombs, 16th century gonder, mishap on the road, and life in bird paradise.