Lalibela is a town where the churches sit below ground, not above it — eleven medieval sanctuaries that were never built but carved, cut straight down into the red volcanic rock of the Ethiopian highlands until only their roofs lay level with the earth. Masons of the Zagwe dynasty began the work in the late 12th century under King Gebre Mesqel Lalibela, freeing each church from a single block of stone, hollowing out windows, columns and ceilings from the top down. The king conceived it as a 'New Jerusalem' after Muslim conquests cut Ethiopian Christians off from the Holy Land, and its features still carry the names of that lost pilgrimage — a channel called the River Jordan runs between the churches, and chapels stand for Golgotha and Bethlehem. Ten of the churches cluster in two groups threaded by trenches and tunnels; the eleventh, Bete Giyorgis, stands alone in a deep pit as a perfect cross cut into the plateau.
This is no ruin. White-robed priests still chant behind hand-painted curtains, and pilgrims descend the same worn steps their ancestors used eight centuries ago. You move between the churches through chest-deep trenches and passages that run pitch dark for a few metres before opening onto another sunken courtyard, where oil lamps burn and daylight falls through cross-shaped windows onto bare rock. During Genna (Ethiopian Christmas, 7 January) and Timkat (Epiphany, 19 January), tens of thousands of chanting worshippers pack the trenches in a sea of white cotton. The faith has outlasted the stone's troubles: rain has eaten at the soft rock for centuries, and today several of the churches shelter under tall, disputed metal canopies raised to hold off the weather. After years disrupted by regional conflict, Lalibela again receives the pilgrims and travellers who have always defined it.