Lalibela
A town in the mountains of Lasta in northern Ethiopia, formerly called Roha, with a group of churches cut from the rock. It is a holy city and place of pilgrimage of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church.
The Life of Lalibela calls the place “the holy city of Roha” and urges every Ethiopian who has heard of its churches to go there (Life of Lalibela Perruchon, pp. 126–127). Jules Perruchon, who edited the Life in 1892, notes that Roha, in the district of Lasta, had come to be known by the name of the king, Gebre Meskel Lalibela (Life of Lalibela Perruchon’s introduction, p. xv). Francisco Álvares, who visited in the 1520s, describes the town as lying on the slope of a mountain, a day and a half’s descent below the summit, and found pilgrims coming to the king’s tomb (Álvares, Prester John of the Indies 53 (pp. 122–131)).
What happened here
- about 1200, traditional dateThe Rock-Hewn Churches of Lalibela
In the highlands of Ethiopia a group of churches is cut whole out of the living rock. Ethiopian tradition ascribes them to the saint-king Lalibela, about 1200; the written sources are late, and archaeologists still debate how long the work took.