Addis Ababa Mayor Adanech Abiebie told a Meskel-Demera celebration at Meskel Square on September 26 that the festival elevates Ethiopia’s national image and cultural wealth, while a separate Meskel weekend rooftop event in Piassa brought Gurage food, live masinko and a Demera bonfire to the city’s holiday calendar. The Ethiopian News Agency reported the mayor’s remarks from the Demera gathering, where she described Meskel-Demera as one of the city’s most vibrant public celebrations and as a festival that has kept its religious essence for centuries while shining in everyday culture. She recalled that Meskel-Demera is registered by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, or UNESCO, as an intangible cultural heritage of humanity.
Speaking at Meskel Square, Mayor Adanech said the holiday holds deep meaning in daily life and joint activities for Ethiopians, and she linked the piled Demera fire to a call for unity across distinct cultures, languages, religions and identities. ENA quoted her saying that people become an unbreakable force that overcomes darkness for both the city and the country when they stand together like the Demera, walk hand in hand and strengthen their unity. She also said Addis Ababa has recently been cited as a center of global attraction, a symbol of cleanliness and an example of urban transformation, and that hosting tourists warmly shows Ethiopian hospitality. Large national and international events, she added, underline the city’s capacity to lead and accommodate major gatherings.
While the official Demera ceremony drew attention at Meskel Square, organizers Addis Foodie and Barba Promotion staged Kitfo Fest number 8 as a Meskel holiday weekend rooftop celebration at Monarch Parkview Hotel in Piassa, according to the AddisToday listings page. The event ran from Saturday, September 26, through Sunday, September 27, on the hotel’s thirteenth and fourteenth floor rooftop at Tewodros Square, in front of Friendship Park. The programme listed cultural food service from noon until late, with traditional Gurage dishes including kitfo, tibs and tire siga, drinks such as tej and areke, desserts, live masinko performances, Guraginya dancers and singers, DJ lineups, games and a Demera bonfire ceremony.
AddisToday described Kitfo Fest as a cultural food festival that brings traditional Gurage cuisine, live music and Meskel holiday festivities into a rooftop setting overlooking Piassa and Friendship Park. Entrance was free, with food and drinks available for purchase, the listing said. That format matters for ordinary Addis nights because it puts a familiar Meskel symbol, the Demera fire, beside Gurage cooking and music in a central neighbourhood rather than treating culture as something that only happens at a single official square. Masinko is a one-string bowed instrument common in Ethiopian traditional music, and Guraginya dancers and singers keep Gurage language and performance styles on a public stage during the holiday weekend.
Meskel marks the Finding of the True Cross in Ethiopian Orthodox tradition, and the Demera bonfire is the eve gathering that crowds watch as flames rise from a tall pile of wood and flowers. UNESCO’s listing of Meskel-Demera as intangible cultural heritage places that public ritual among practices the world body treats as living heritage rather than as a museum exhibit. Mayor Adanech’s ENA remarks stressed both the religious essence and the cross-generational benefits of the holiday, while also tying the celebration to Addis Ababa’s image as a city that can host large events. Those official lines sit beside the Kitfo Fest programme’s more informal mix of food stalls, music and a rooftop Demera for people who spent the Meskel weekend in Piassa.
Kitfo is minced raw beef mixed with spiced butter in Gurage cooking, often served with kocho or injera, while tibs are sautéed meat and tire siga is raw meat cut for sharing at the table. Tej is honey wine and areke is a strong distilled spirit, both familiar at holiday and family gatherings across Ethiopia. Placing those dishes next to a Demera bonfire on a Piassa rooftop ties a Gurage food celebration to the same Meskel eve fire that Mayor Adanech described at Meskel Square as a shared national value. The AddisToday listing did not publish attendance figures, and this report does not invent any.
Northern Ethiopia remains under renewed fighting this same month, with civilian hospitals and displacement figures filling international reports, yet Addis Ababa’s Meskel calendar still filled Meskel Square and a Piassa rooftop with Demera light, Gurage dishes and live music. The open sources for this story do not invent attendance counts for either event, and they do not claim that holiday crowds erase the northern war. What they do show is that UNESCO-listed Meskel-Demera and a free-entrance Kitfo Fest weekend continued as named cultural facts in the capital while other parts of the country faced a very different news cycle.
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