Alastair Sooke finds inspiration in the extraordinary churches of Ethiopia and
scales a cliff to visit one of the oldest buildings in the world still in
use – which his grandfather restored in the Forties.
June 21,2013 (The Telegraph)Alastair Sooke finds inspiration in the
extraordinary churches of Ethiopia and scales a cliff to visit one of
the oldest buildings in the world still in use – which his grandfather
restored in the Forties.
“Are you going to climb barefoot or wearing boots?”
In front of me was a wall of creamy-brown rock, mottled with
footholds worn through centuries of use. My destination was situated
nearly 60ft above my head: the threshold to the ancient monastery of
Debra Damo, which occupies the summit of a rocky outcrop, entirely
surrounded by cliffs, in the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia, a few
miles south of the border with Eritrea. The only way to enter it is to
haul yourself up a plaited-leather rope that hangs from a ledge
adjoining the monastery’s gatehouse.
Thankfully, for outsiders like me, there is an additional strap that
functions as a rudimentary safety harness, held taut by one or two monks
above. After considering the question of my gung-ho guide, I unlaced my
boots, in the hope that unshod feet would yield better grip, and began
to heave. A few minutes later, my biceps burning, I clambered into the
arms of the middle-aged monk who had been helping to pull me up. The
hard part was behind me: the rest of the climb could be undertaken using
steps.
Although this was my first visit to Debra Damo, I already felt some
acquaintance with the monastery. This is because my maternal
grandfather, Derek Matthews, who was an architect, lived among the monks
here for several months while he restored the larger of the religious
community’s two churches in the late 1940s. This crumbling structure has
been used continuously for Christian worship since it was built,
probably during the sixth century AD. My grandfather, who died in 2009,
described it as “one of the oldest buildings in the world still in use”.
As a child, I often heard about his time there, and imagined him as a
nimble 28 year-old, hurtling up and down the leather rope with the
sure-footed alacrity of a vervet monkey. At the end of last year, I
decided to visit it for myself.
Ensuring
the survival of the church at Debra Damo was my grandfather’s first job
as a qualified architect. He was already familiar with East Africa
thanks to his experiences during the Second World War, when he helped to
liberate Ethiopia from Italian occupation in 1941. In the same year,
gunshot shattered his left elbow and crippled his left leg. After six
weeks in a hospital in Alexandria, he was invalided out of the Army, and
retrained at the Bartlett School of Architecture.
While he was studying, a British entomologist and pioneering
architectural historian, David Buxton, visited Debra Damo in 1944.
Lamenting the ruinous state of the monastery’s famous church, Buxton
wrote to Haile Selassie recommending it be restored. (The church is
dedicated to Abuna Za-Mika’el Aregawi, one of the so-called “Nine
Saints” who spread Christianity through the ancient Aksumite kingdom in
what is now northern Ethiopia in the fifth or sixth centur y AD.
According to tradition, Abuna Aregawi founded the monastery after he was
safely dropped on top of the mountain by a serpent.) The Ethiopian
emperor petitioned the British government, and upon the recommendation
of the prominent architect Albert Richardson, who taught at the
Bartlett, my grandfather was offered the job.
It was a prestigious commission. According to David Phillipson,
author of Ancient Churches of Ethiopia (2009): “Debra Damo is a truly
remarkable place. Its subsequent development has seen a great deal of
rebuilding, but the basic form of the large church originates from the
sixth century. Elsewhere in the world the great majority of churches
built in that period are either in ruins or incorporated into later
structures, or have disappeared altogether.” The decoration of Debra
Damo provided the prototype for the famous 13th-century monolithic
rock-hewn churches at Lalibela in northern Ethiopia
