[ad_1]
Maryam Dengelat is one of the 200 rock churches in Tigray, which according to tradition was excavated in the 6th century. The church, located near Adigrat on the other side of the Agame Massif, has been inaccessible for about 400 years since a section of the mountain collapsed, taking with it the entrance to the church.
On March 24, 2019, for the first time in more than 400 years, priests were able to celebrate a mass in the church, having climbed 30 meters. Thanks to two Italian mountaineers, the five priests managed to ascend and penetrate inside the church to lead the ceremony. An electrician also came up to install the light and speaker.
A gathering of 300 priests, including Melake Genet Abba Kidane Mariam, personal assistant to His Holiness Abune Mathias, officials and worshipers attended the ceremony at the foot of the cliffs.
It all started a year ago when Hagos Gebremariam from Adigrat University approached Luigi Cantamessa, owner of Korkor Lodge and author of the Ethiopian guide, to ask him if he could help him organize logistical and professional support to access the church. Luigi responded positively and began contacting potential volunteers to carry out the task.
In March 2019, Giorgio Malluci and his partner, Elizabetta Galli, Italian mountaineers and active members of Mountain Wilderness, responded to their friend’s call. They were assigned the task of climbing and equipping the towering rock face that separates the church from the underlying plain at a height equivalent to two 5-story buildings. It took them three weeks of work, a driller in hand to fix the concrete irons in the rock and the iron path pythons that will finally allow access to the small wooden door trapped in the middle of a stone wall. Despite the discomfort, the physical effort and the poor quality of the rock, Giorgio ends up reaching the level of the church, under the astonished gaze of the villagers.
On March 24, a local priest, Haftey Araya, was hoisted along the cliff wall. He managed to open the church, becoming the clergyman to re-enter the Maryam Dengelat church after the fourth century.
“Abandoning Maryam Dengelat is no longer an option,” Luigi Cantamessa promised to the religious community during the reopening ceremony. Much work remained before the troglodyte church could be returned to the community. A crowdfunding campaign was launched and a handful of French volunteers landed six months later. Among them, Olivier Grunewald, photographer and mountaineer, and Stéphane Trannoy, a hard-to-reach job specialist, came to strengthen the security of the church. For three days, they rose from dawn along the cliff and with masks and shovels, attacked the evacuation of an 80 cm thick carpet, with excrement accumulated by generations of birds. The reinforcing priests searched tirelessly amid the guano, from which they extracted whole pottery, porcelain fragments originating in China, small illuminated leather bibles and, most importantly, the church’s Tabot. Luigi with Stephen Rickerby and Lisa Shekede, experts in wall painting conservation, examined the frescoes, including the presence amidst the frescoes of Stephanos, a sacred figure to whom the region’s Orthodox seem so attached.
The Maryam Dengelat door closes again, but there is an ongoing project to establish a museum in an existing building located at the base. Since the site itself will not be open to the public, the museum will display photographs of the church’s wall paintings and artifacts.
A YouTube video uploaded by Olivier Grunewald shows Elizabetta Galli equipping the iron path to allow access to the church.
