{"it":{"id":"AFR-005","kind":"site","sub":"Africa outside Egypt","name":"Lalibela","place":"Ethiopia","lat":12.032,"lon":39.041,"mat":"earth","facts":[{"a":"UNESCO listing","v":"1978","u":"text","r":46}],"nfacts":4,"tags":["Africa"],"sum":"Eleven churches at Lalibela in Ethiopia were not built up from the ground. They were cut downward into solid volcanic rock, each roof level with the surrounding ground and each interior hollowed out of a single mass.","why":"Churches carved downward out of solid rock, still in use, and copied in name from Jerusalem.","src":[337],"nsrc":2,"yt":"One project or many?","rel":["ASI-007","AFR-002"],"hook":"Lalibela's eleven churches were cut from living rock, doors, windows and roofs included."},"S":{"46":["Wikipedia Lalibela","https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lalibela&oldid=1376595937"],"337":["Wikipedia: Lalibela","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lalibela"]},"rec":{"id":"AFR-005","alias":[],"ms":[{"f":"Lalibela is roughly","a":"elevation","v":"2500","u":"m","o":"Lalibela is roughly 2500 m above sea level.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lalibela&oldid=1376595937","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1376595937 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M0590"},{"f":"set fire to was Gannata Maryam 10 miles","a":"dimension (unspecified)","v":"16","u":"km","o":"He concludes by stating that had Ahmad al-Ghazi burned a church at Lalibela, it was most likely Biete Medhane Alem; and if the Adalites was either mistaken or misled by the locals, then the church he set fire to was Gannata Maryam, \"10 miles [16 km] east of Lalibela which likewise has a colonnade of pillars cut from the mountain.\" REF16","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lalibela&oldid=1376595937","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1376595937 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M0591"},{"f":"town","a":"elevation","v":"~2,500","u":"m","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia Lalibela","yr":"2026","m":"as stated","c":"Wikipedia Lalibela","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lalibela&oldid=1376595937","b":"S","bb":"","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M3422"},{"f":"churches","a":"UNESCO listing","v":"1978","u":"text","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia Lalibela","yr":"2026","m":"as stated","c":"Wikipedia Lalibela","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lalibela&oldid=1376595937","b":"S","bb":"","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M3423"}],"lab":[],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[],"dat":[],"aa":[],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"sub":[],"site":{"age":"","dm":"[see dating_excerpt; method not extracted]","lab":"NO: inference only (style/context/king list/textual)","weak":"no direct lab result on the structure in our records; date from stylistic, contextual or textual inference","unesco":"","dens":"CENSUS"},"co":{"lat":"12.03166667","lon":"39.04111111","src":"Wikidata P625 only + curated wave0 value agrees","agree":"agree","b":"V","note":"two independent sources agree; max delta 0.0050 deg (~0.56 km)","osm":"https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/11893027669"},"src":[{"id":"S0324","t":"no inline ref in article","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lalibela&oldid=1376595937"},{"id":"S0518","t":"Wikipedia: Lalibela","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lalibela"},{"id":"VAFR-005-3","t":"UNESCO World Heritage Centre: Rock-Hewn Churches, Lalibela","u":"https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/18/"},{"id":null,"t":"David W. Phillipson, “Ancient Ethiopian Churches in Historical Perspective,” British Academy.","u":"https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/documents/499/10-Phillipson.pdf"},{"id":null,"t":"Current World Archaeology, “Lalibela, Ethiopia, Rock-Hewn Churches.”","u":"https://www.world-archaeology.com/features/lalibela-ethiopa-rock-hewn-churches/"}],"sum":"Walk across the high ground at Lalibela, in the mountains of central Ethiopia, and you could pass within a few steps of a church without seeing it. There is no spire on the skyline, no wall rising from the earth. Then the ground simply ends. At your feet a trench drops away, and at the bottom of the pit, its roof level with the soles of your shoes, stands a building carved in the shape of a cross. It was not built. It was released from the rock, the way a sculptor releases a figure from a block of marble, except that this figure has doors, windows, columns and an interior large enough to hold a congregation.\n\nThere are eleven of these churches, some 645 kilometres from Addis Ababa in a town that stands about 2,500 metres above sea level. UNESCO, which listed them in 1978, describes them as \"hewn from the living rock of monolithic blocks.\" The method, in plain terms, was subtraction. The carvers cut a deep trench around a block of bedrock, isolating it from the hillside. Then they hollowed the block from the inside, chiselling out the doors, windows, columns, floors and roofs. The rock is volcanic tuff, a stone made of compacted volcanic ash, soft enough to carve but solid enough to stand for centuries. Nothing was added. Every surface you touch is the mountain itself.\n\nThink about what that demands. A mason building a wall can correct a mistake by pulling out a stone. A carver working downward into rock cannot. Every cut is final. To shape a church from a single mass, someone had to see the whole finished building inside the stone before the first blow, and then hold that vision steady while crews dug out the rock around it and within it.\n\nThe greatest of them, Biete Medhani Alem, has five aisles and is believed to be the largest monolithic church in the world, monolithic meaning cut from one piece of rock. The most famous is Biete Ghiorgis, the House of Saint George, the cross-shaped church that rises from a pit about 11 metres deep, as deep as a four-storey building is tall. It is reached by an entrance trench some 30 metres long. Its lower windows follow the old pattern of Aksum, the earlier Ethiopian kingdom to the north, and some of them are false: carved on the outside, they do not pass through to the interior. They are a memory of architecture, kept in stone for its own sake.\n\nThe churches are arranged in groups. One lies north of a seasonal stream, another south of it, and Biete Ghiorgis stands apart, linked to the others by trenches. Between them runs a network of drainage ditches, trenches and ceremonial passages, some of which open into hermit caves and catacombs, underground chambers for burial. Walking it is like moving through the streets of a city that has been sunk into the earth.\n\nThe names explain the plan. That seasonal stream is called the Jordan. A hill nearby is the Mount of Olives. In the church of Golgotha there are replicas of the tomb of Christ, of Adam and of the crib of the Nativity. Tradition credits all of this to King Lalibela, who reigned in the late twelfth and early thirteenth century. Early in his reign Saladin took Jerusalem, and Muslim conquests cut off Christian pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The king's answer, the story goes, was to build a New Jerusalem on his own soil. It is a move a strategist would admire. If the holy city is closed to your people, you do not mourn it. You bring it home, and with it the authority that comes from being its keeper.\n\nLalibela flourished after the decline of Aksum, and it remains one of the high places of Ethiopian Christianity today, home to a large community of priests and monks and crowded with pilgrims at the great feasts. Two churches, Biete Mercoreos and Biete Gabriel Rafael, may once have been royal residences, UNESCO notes, which hints at a site that served more than one purpose.\n\nThat hint is where the archaeologist David Phillipson begins a different reading. Because the churches connect, he points out, later cuts can be seen interrupting earlier ones, and that lets you work out the order in which they were made. On his evidence, two of the oldest structures were at first defensive, linked by a tunnel, and only later turned into churches. He puts the oldest work in the seventh or eighth century, some 500 years before King Lalibela. The great basilicas such as Biete Maryam came next, perhaps in the tenth or eleventh century, and the king's own phase was the last, the one that added the Jerusalem names. The tradition, Phillipson concludes, is right about the present form and meaning of the site, but not about how it began.\n\nSo even the mainstream view is divided, between a single royal programme in one reign and a slow, phased creation across five centuries. Both have weight. Neither has laboratory dates to settle it. Phillipson's phases rest on style and the order of cutting rather than on any radiocarbon result.\n\nAnd there is a deeper problem that no reading escapes. Rock-cut work erases the evidence of how it was made. When you build up, you leave scaffolding holes, ramps, rubble, the marks of process. When you carve down, the process is the very thing you remove. How long each church took, how many people carved it, what tools they used and how they planned the work are all unknown. The spoil from the trenches, the tonnes of tuff that once filled these pits, is not described in the record. Even the ditches have a lost history: they were filled with earth for several centuries, cleared only in the twentieth century, and disturbed by earthquakes, and today water damage has left most of the churches in a critical state.\n\nWhat remains is a set of buildings that seem to have been found inside the mountain rather than made. Pilgrims still descend into the pits to pray where the rock was opened. Perhaps one king saw the New Jerusalem whole and ordered it cut. Perhaps it grew slowly, the work of generations who each saw a little further into the stone. Either way, someone first looked at a bare volcanic hillside and understood that a church was waiting inside it. How did they know where the walls would be before a single one existed?","qs":["How did the carvers see the finished building before the first cut?","What does it mean to build a new Jerusalem?","Why might two of the churches have started as royal homes?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/aa/Lalibela%2C_san_giorgio%2C_esterno_24.jpg/1280px-Lalibela%2C_san_giorgio%2C_esterno_24.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lalibela,_san_giorgio,_esterno_24.jpg","title":"Lalibela, san giorgio, esterno 24.jpg","lic":"CC BY 3.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0","by":"Sailko","cap":"Biete Ghiorgis"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/07/Bet_Abba_Libanos_%285499043130%29.jpg/1280px-Bet_Abba_Libanos_%285499043130%29.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bet_Abba_Libanos_(5499043130).jpg","title":"Bet Abba Libanos (5499043130).jpg","lic":"CC BY 2.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0","by":"Katie Hunt from St Albans, UK","cap":"Bet Abba Libanos"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1b/Bet_Maryam%2C_Lalibela%2C_Ethiopia_-_panoramio_%281%29.jpg/1280px-Bet_Maryam%2C_Lalibela%2C_Ethiopia_-_panoramio_%281%29.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bet_Maryam,_Lalibela,_Ethiopia_-_panoramio_(1).jpg","title":"Bet Maryam, Lalibela, Ethiopia - panoramio (1).jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 3.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0","by":"MarcD.","cap":"Bet Maryam, Lalibela, Ethiopia"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9c/Bete_Abba_Libanos.jpg/1280px-Bete_Abba_Libanos.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bete_Abba_Libanos.jpg","title":"Bete Abba Libanos.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 3.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0","by":"Bernard Gagnon","cap":"Bete Abba Libanos, Lalibela, Ethiopia"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/21/Bete_Emmanuel.jpg/1280px-Bete_Emmanuel.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bete_Emmanuel.jpg","title":"Bete Emmanuel.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 3.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0","by":"Bernard Gagnon","cap":"Bete Emmanuel, Lalibela, Ethiopia"}]},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":[{"v":"1978","u":"text","h":"UNESCO listing","s":[87]},{"v":"Earth","h":"Made of","s":[88]}],"hs":{"87":["Wikipedia Lalibela","https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lalibela&oldid=1376595937"],"88":["Wikipedia: Lalibela (and sources cited there)","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lalibela"]},"lh":{"s":"img/h/AFR-005.webp","w":1280,"h":1109,"o":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/aa/Lalibela%2C_san_giorgio%2C_esterno_24.jpg/1280px-Lalibela%2C_san_giorgio%2C_esterno_24.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail"}}