Restoration to begin on Ethiopia's rock-hewn churches

Four of Ethiopia's nine World Heritage Sites – the Rock-Hewn Churches of Lalibela, the Aksum Obelisk, Fasil Ghebbi in Gondar and the Tiya stelae – are to undergo repairs this year.

Director of the Authority for Conservation of Cultural Heritage, Haile Zeleke, said the heritage sites have suffered damage because of their age.

Maintenance work on the churches of Lalibela, which consist of 11 medieval monolithic cave churches, and the Aksum obelisk, the ruins of the ancient city of Aksum, will commence this year.

The churches of Lalibela, dubbed the 'Eighth Wonder of the World', are still in active use today. They represent the apex of an Ethiopian underground church building tradition that dates to the arrival of Christianity in about 350AD.

Aksum, the oldest continuously-inhabited city in sub-Saharan Africa, served as capital of the Aksumite Kingdom, which was the dominant trade entity in the Horn of Africa for over a millennium prior to the rise of Islam, stretching from the Sudanese Nile across the Red Sea to Yemen.

Works on the Fasil Ghebbi in Gondar, which are experiencing cracking, will be launched as soon as a consulting firm has been selected.

The fortress-city of Fasil Ghebbi was the residence of the Ethiopian Emperor Fasilides and his successors. The city, surrounded by a 900m-long wall, contains palaces, churches, monasteries and unique public and private buildings.

The Tiya monuments are experiencing cracking and tilting problems, believed to have been caused by the landscape and the type of soil.

Tiya is among the most important of the roughly 160 archaeological sites discovered so far in the Soddo area, south of Addis Ababa. It contains 36 monuments including 32 carved stelae covered with symbols, most of which are difficult to decipher. They are the remains of an ancient Ethiopian culture whose age has not yet been precisely determined.

Thirty four million Ethiopian Birr has been allocated for the renovation, with $400,000 secured from donors.

Ethiopia has nine UNESCO World Heritage Sites, the most of any country in Africa. Eight of these are cultural, and one – the Simien Mountains National Park – is natural. Five other sites in Ethiopia are currently under consideration by UNESCO as Tentative World Heritage Sites.

* Independent Catholic News https://www.indcatholicnews.com/

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