Notas del episodio
At about 8,200 feet in Ethiopia's Amhara highlands, Lalibela holds 11 monolithic churches carved downward into volcanic rock. Tradition credits King Gebre Meskel Lalibela of the Zagwe dynasty, who ruled roughly 1181 to 1221 and was said to have been shown Jerusalem by Jesus in a vision. After Saladin captured Jerusalem in 1187 and cut off Ethiopian pilgrimage, the king built a second Jerusalem, even renaming the local river the Jordan. Scholars have stretched that story. David Buxton concluded the excavation ran into the 14th century, and Cambridge professor David Phillipson argued that structures like the churches of Mercurios and Gabriel-Rufael were first carved between 600 and 800 AD as Aksumite fortresses or palaces, later rebranded as churches.
In 1882 French explorer Achille Raffray claimed a manuscript proved 500 Europeans led by a Sidi Meskal built the churches. In 1940 Arnold van Lantschoot at the Vatican Library showed Raffray had mistaken Coptic for medieval Greek and the documents were routine land and church texts. The churches outlasted Ahmad al-Ghazi's 16th century campaigns and modern wars from 1936 to the Tigray War, and still fill with pilgrims at Genna and Timkat.
- Isolating each block with trenches, carving roofs and gutters first, then hollowing interiors while mimicking Aksumite timber framing
- An artesian water system that pushes pressurized groundwater up into wells beside the churches with no pumps
- Bete Medhane Alem, called the largest monolithic church in the world, and the cross-shaped Church of St. George
- Queen Meskel Kibra's church of Bete Abba Libanos, built as a memorial to her husband
- Miguel de Castanhoso's 1544 account of attackers setting off gunpowder inside the churches with no structural damage