Church of Saint George

You do not see this church until you are almost standing on top of it. You walk across a shelf of red volcanic rock, high in the mountains of northern Lalibela. Then the ground opens at your feet. Below you, carved straight down into the stone, stands a church in the shape of a perfect cross. This is the Church of Saint George. In Amharic, people call it Bete Giyorgis, the House of George.

Pause at the rim before you go down. The pit is about 12 meters deep, and the church fills it like a sculpture inside a box. Its roof lies level with the ground under your feet. Carved into that roof are three Greek crosses, one set inside another. Rain has washed over those crosses for roughly eight hundred years, and they are still sharp enough to read from above.

Nothing here was built in the usual sense. Everything was removed. Workers began at the flat surface and cut downward, trench by trench, until they had freed a single block from the mountain. Then they hollowed that block into a church, with doorways, windows, and inner rooms. The walls, the roof, and the floor are one continuous piece of stone. There is no mortar and there are no joints.

Tradition credits this work to King Lalibela, a ruler of the Zagwe dynasty who reigned around the year 1200. The town, once called Roha, later took his name. Eleven rock-hewn churches stand here, cut in clusters into the hillside. The Church of Saint George stands apart from the rest, alone in its own courtyard, and many visitors save it for last.

A story explains why it stands alone. It says that Saint George, the patron saint of Lalibela, appeared to the king and asked why no church carried his name. The king promised him the finest church of all. Guides still point to hollows in the trench wall and call them the hoofprints of the saint's horse. This is legend rather than record, but people here tell it with warmth.

Historians add a wider frame. In the twelfth century, war made the road to Jerusalem dangerous for Lalibelan pilgrims. Tradition says King Lalibela answered by carving a holy city at home, a new Jerusalem in the highlands. A water channel that runs through the site is named after the Jordan River, and several places here carry names borrowed from the Holy Land.

To reach the church, you walk down through a narrow trench cut into the living rock. The path slopes and turns, and the walls rise higher around you with every step. The sky narrows to a strip of blue overhead. The air grows cooler. Then the trench opens into a sunken courtyard, and the church rises over you, taller than it looked from above.

Stand close and study the walls. They lean gently inward as they rise, which gives the building its balanced, rooted look. The church rests on a base of three carved steps. The windows of the upper level have rounded, keyhole-like tops, while the lower openings are simpler and darker. In the late afternoon, the stone turns from brown to deep red and gold.

Now look at the courtyard walls around the church. Small openings are cut into the rock face. Some of them hold human remains. Pilgrims and monks asked to be laid to rest here, as close to the holy place as possible. Their dried remains are still visible in the open niches. It is a quiet and startling sight, and it says much about what this place means.

This is not a ruin and not a museum. It is a working church of the Lalibelan Orthodox Tewahedo faith. A priest is often on duty inside, ready to show a processional cross. Services still fill the courtyard with slow chanting. At Genna, the Lalibelan Christmas on January 7, huge crowds of pilgrims wrapped in white gather at Lalibela, and this church draws many of them.

The churches of Lalibela joined the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1978, among the first places in the world to be inscribed. Of the eleven, Saint George is widely considered the best preserved. It still stands open to the sky, without the protective shelters that now cover several of its neighbors, so you see it much as pilgrims saw it centuries ago.

Before you leave, climb back to the rim and stop once more. Most builders raise stone toward the sky. Here, workers carved down into the earth and found a church waiting inside the rock. Centuries of bare feet have polished its floor. Stand still for a moment, let the wind pass over the opening, and let the silence of the pit settle around you.