The African King: Christmas in Ethiopia
As Ethiopia celebrates Christ’s birth and baptism, Simon Scott Plummer visits a land steeped in the Old and New Testaments
‘The “graves” of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are in Bet Maryam’
At Gondar, in the highlands of Ethiopia, is a stone-lined pool surrounded by banyan trees and overlooked by a twostorey pavilion. There, on 20th January, a ceremony will take place that illustrates the country’s unique form of Christianity.
A replica of the Ark of the Covenant, the wooden chest containing the two tablets on which the Ten Commandments were written, is taken from its church altar and brought to the pool. When the priest dips his processional cross into the water, men and boys leap in after it.
This three-day festival, called Timkat, celebrates the baptism of Jesus in the River Jordan. In popular culture, it overshadows Christmas, which will have passed 12 days earlier. And it points to the extraordinary link between Ethiopian Orthodoxy and the Old Testament.
The Church believes that when the Queen of Sheba went to Jerusalem to learn from the wisdom of King Solomon, she also shared his bed. The result of that liaison, Menelik, visited his father when he was 20 and returned home with the Ark of the Covenant and Old Testament books. The ark, called tabot in Ge’ez, the Ethiopian liturgical language, now rests in the compound of the cathedral in
Axum. Only the monk who stands guard is allowed to set eyes on it.
That semitic inheritance in Ethiopia pre-dates the birth of Christ by around 1,000 years. Its influence can be seen today in the veneration by Christians of the Sabbath as well as the Lord’s Day, the practice of circumcision and abstention from eating pork – ironic phenomena in a country from which the remnant of the Jewish community was evacuated to Israel at the end of the last century to escape civil war and famine.
There are also frequent references to the Old Testament in Ethiopian Church iconography. The ‘graves’ of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are in Bet Maryam, Lalibela. Outside Bet Giyorgis, in the same highland town, reeds represent the olive branch the dove brought back to Noah’s Ark when the flood had receded. A slope in the rock-cut trench, where the church stands, symbolises Mount Ararat, on which the ark came to rest.
By Lake Tana, the wonderful jumble of Old and New Testament scenes in the murals of Ura Kidane Mihret shows the extent to which Israel’s history permeates Ethiopian Orthodoxy.
The Church in Ethiopia was founded in Axum in around AD 342 by King Ezana and Bishop Frumentius. Along with Armenia and Georgia, Ethiopia is thus one of the oldest Christian states in the world. Its conversion precedes the declaration of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire by some 40 years.
Frumentius, who was from Syria, was consecrated bishop by Patriarch Athanasius of Alexandria and the subordination of the Ethiopian Church to Coptic control lasted until it was granted autocephaly in 1959.
The authority of the Ethiopian emperors derived from their being successors of Solomon; that of the archbishops through their connections with Alexandria.
That duopoly was brutally broken in 1974 when the Communist military junta called the Derg toppled and probably murdered Haile Selassie, bringing to an end a dynasty that had ruled Ethiopia since 1270.
In his history of the Ethiopian Church, John Binns writes of that coup and the
post-derg creation of a federal state guaranteeing freedom of religion, ‘The state of Ethiopia, defined by its monarchy, language and faith, had been dismantled. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tawehedo Church found that it was no longer a national church but one of a number of religious communities in a multi-ethnic republic.’
How has it coped with those seismic changes? Dr Binns thinks that a church created top-down in the fourth century AD has, since the coup, been strengthened from the base up, with parish councils taking more responsibility – a reflection of the deep-rooted faith of Ethiopians. It is estimated that, by 2050, the Ethiopian Church’s membership will be 56 million and that it will have overtaken Russia as the largest national Eastern Orthodox Church.
Its continuing vitality is obvious from the number of new church buildings, the size of the white-robed congregations and their willing response to the demands made of them.
The main services last all night and Dr Binns writes that most Orthodox Christians fast on about 180 days a year – which means not eating or drinking till the afternoon, when the eucharistic liturgy has been celebrated.
Orthodox growth has been more than matched by Protestant churches, which are concentrated in the southern part of the country. Membership is projected to rise to 49 million by the middle of the century.
The Prime Minister, Abiy Ahmed, winner of the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize, is a member of the Pentecostal Full Gospel Believers’ Church, the third biggest of the Evangelical churches in Ethiopia. His mother was a Christian from the state of Amhara, part of the Orthodox heartland; his father was a Muslim from the state of Oromo.
Protestantism came to Ethiopia in the 19th century, starting in earnest with the British Church Missionary Society followed by Swedish Lutherans and, early in the 20th century, American Baptists.
The Roman Catholic presence reached its apogee in 1622, when the Jesuits persuaded Emperor Susenyos to convert. Ten years later, he was forced to abdicate in favour of his son, who reversed the outlawing of Orthodoxy and expelled the Jesuits. Today, Catholics form about one per cent of a total population estimated at 113 million.
Over a third of Ethiopians, predominantly in the east, are Muslims. Harar, their capital, is regarded as one of Islam’s holiest cities. In the 16th century, an imam nicknamed Gragn devastated the highland churches until a band of Portuguese adventurers, under the son of the explorer Vasco da Gama, came to the rescue.
So Ethiopia is a multi-faith society. But what is original about its religious architecture and practice is to be found in the Orthodox Church, the only pre-colonial church in sub-saharan Africa, with its unmatched rock-cut churches in Lalibela, dating from the 12th and 13th centuries, and its distinctive liturgical calendar.
The most famous of the Lalibela churches is Bet Giyorgis, dedicated to St George, whose place among saints in Ethiopian iconography is second only to that of the Virgin Mary. It is not the largest of the town’s churches but the most beautiful, a slender, three-tiered, cruciform monolith standing in a square pit some 40 feet deep.
The other popular feast for Ethiopians is Meskel, which in late September celebrates the finding of the true cross by Helena, mother of the Byzantine Emperor Constantine. Bonfires are lit in memory of her being told to light a fire, too, and note where the smoke hit the ground. There the cross was to be found.
Christmas and Easter, which are preceded by long fasts, are less public occasions than Timkat and Meskel.
For Christmas, known as Genna, there is not the same tradition of presentgiving as in the West. For our roast turkey, substitute a spicy chicken stew called doro wot. For our post-prandial walk, substitute a kind of hockey which the shepherds are said to have played on hearing of the birth of Christ, or the throwing of spears by men mounted on horses. Ethiopia is truly a land apart.
Ethiopian Airlines flies from Britain to Addis Ababa from £443 return; Mayleko Lodge, Gondar: doubles from £85; reservations@maylekolodge.net