The Churches That
Swallowed the Mountain

The "usurpers" built this

In the last story, we traced how the Kebra Nagast was compiled between 1314 and 1322 to legitimise a coup — how six Tigrayan scribes declared the Zagwe dynasty usurpers and built a mythological bloodline that would rule Ethiopia for 704 years.

Here is what the "usurpers" actually built.

Eleven churches. Carved not from blocks hauled up a hillside, but from the living rock of the earth itself. Carved downward. You do not approach them. You descend into them. Their roofs sit at ground level. The architecture is below you before you see it.

The Solomonic dynasty needed a 117-chapter book to justify their rule. The Zagwe left something the book could not erase: stone.

How you carve a church out of a mountain

You do not build. You remove. This is subtractive architecture — the opposite of every construction method the world has known. Humans have been stacking stones for millennia. Lalibela inverted the instinct.

Four monolithic. Seven semi-monolithic. All connected by tunnels.

What your body can actually do there

This is not a museum. It is not flat. It was designed to be difficult — the idea being that reaching God is not an easy path.

During major festivals — Genna (January 7), Timkat (January 20) — up to 100,000 pilgrims arrive, including the very old and the very young. Everyone sets their own pace. The churches are living sites, not exhibits.

The Zagwe's answer was not a genealogy. It was architecture.

The Zagwe faced a legitimacy problem from the start. They could not claim descent from the Aksumite kings. Their answer: by building a physical Jerusalem in Ethiopia, they asserted that God's favour had shifted to their dynasty. They did not need Solomon's blood. They had Solomon's city.

This is the same argument the Kebra Nagast would later make against them — but the Zagwe made it in stone, not in text. Their Jerusalem was not a 117-chapter story. It was 11 churches you could walk into.

Three Zagwe kings were canonised as saints by the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. The dynasty that replaced them never received that honour.

The story tried to bury them. The stone did not cooperate.

The Solomonic dynasty ruled for 704 years. They wrote the Kebra Nagast. They enshrined their bloodline in two constitutions. They dismissed the Zagwe as illegitimate.

The churches of Lalibela have stood for 800 years.

UNESCO declared them a World Heritage Site in 1978 — four years after the dynasty that tried to erase the Zagwe was itself overthrown.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims — dressed in white, carrying frankincense, chanting prayers that echo through the tunnels — descend into the rock to worship. The churches are not monuments. They are not ruins. They are active. They are in use. Every single day.