Monolithic churches in Lalibela
The number of Wikipedia languages with an article is our measure of how widely known a site is. How many people have stood at a site or want to go will be shown once enough people use the app.
Seals, your want-to-go list and the year you stood here are kept in the iPhone app.
How it came to be
In the mountain town of Lalibela, about 645 km from Addis Ababa, eleven medieval churches were cut down into the rock. They are attributed to King Gebre Meskel Lalibela of the Zagwe dynasty, who reigned around 1181-1221.
Tradition says that before he became king, Lalibela was shown Jerusalem by Christ and told to build a second Jerusalem in Ethiopia, at a time when Muslim conquests had halted pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The stream through the town is called the Jordan. Five churches stand north of it and five south, and the eleventh, Biete Ghiorgis, stands apart on a cross-shaped plan. The churches probably reached their present form in several phases.
Trenches were cut around blocks of living rock, which were then carved into doors, windows, columns, floors and roofs. Biete Medhani Alem is believed to be the largest monolithic church in the world. The Portuguese priest Francisco Álvares, who came in the 1520s, wrote that he feared he would not be believed if he wrote more. The churches were inscribed in 1978 and remain a place of pilgrimage.
Data: Wikidata (CC0). Photos: Wikimedia Commons, under each photo’s license. Prototype; may contain errors. We measure usage anonymously to improve the app (PostHog, EU).