Travel publisher Rough Guides named Ethiopia's Lalibela among the 100 Best Places on Earth in a bucket-list book due out on Sept. 1, 2019, nazret.com reported.
Bete Giyorgis, the Church of St. George, in Lalibela, November 2012 (Bernard Gagnon / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0) [file photo]
The guide called Ethiopia “an enigmatic and utterly beguiling country,” pointing to its injera-based cuisine, its ancient language and Amharic script, and its Orthodox Christian festivals and religious buildings.
It described Lalibela's churches, carved out of red rock below ground some 900 years ago, as “an astonishing feat of engineering.” Each January, it noted, the tunnels and staircases linking the 11 churches fill with thousands of worshippers dressed in white for a 12-hour Christmas mass.
UNESCO inscribed the Rock-Hewn Churches of Lalibela as a World Heritage site in 1978. It says the 11 monolithic churches, about 645 kilometers from Addis Ababa, are attributed to King Lalibela, who set out to build a “New Jerusalem” after Muslim conquests halted Christian pilgrimages to the Holy Land.
UNESCO lists Biete Medhani Alem as probably the largest monolithic church in the world and notes the cruciform plan of Biete Ghiorgis, the Church of St. George. It also warns that water damage has left most of the churches in critical condition.
Sources: nazret.com, via Wayback Machine, UNESCO World Heritage Centre: Rock-Hewn Churches, Lalibela