Lalibela is a town in the Lasta mountains of the Amhara region of northern Ethiopia, at 2,500 metres, where eleven medieval churches were carved downward out of the red volcanic rock in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as a New Jerusalem, each cut from a single block and sunk in its own pit, and they are still in use, with priests chanting in them and pilgrims in white filling the trenches between. King Lalibela of the Zagwe dynasty is said to have built them after Jerusalem fell to Saladin in 1187, so that his people could make the pilgrimage at home, and the river through the site is named the Jordan; tradition holds that he raised all eleven in twenty-four years, too little for human hands, so the faithful say angels carried on the carving each night, and his name means the bees recognise his sovereignty. The churches are linked by a maze of chest-deep trenches and dim tunnels, carved so that pilgrims move between sanctuaries without climbing back to open ground, and the largest, Bete Medhane Alem, ringed by 34 pillars, is the biggest monolithic church on Earth, standing in a pit deep enough to dwarf a person.
The most famous is the last built, Bete Giyorgis, the church of St. George, whose roof from the rim of its pit reads as one clean Greek cross cut down into the rock, twelve metres deep, the image that has come to stand for Ethiopia itself. Inside, priests in white and gold vestments chant in Ge'ez, the ancient liturgical language, while deacons sway with sistrums and drums, and at Genna, Christmas in January, tens of thousands of pilgrims walk in from the countryside and sleep in the trenches. Dozens of hermit cells and chapels honeycomb the cliffs beyond, some reached by rope, and the soft rock erodes in the rains, so that metal shelters raised over four churches in 2008 for ten years still stand. Lalibela is Jerusalem cut into a mountain, and the prayers in it never stopped.