St Mary Church of Zion and the Stelae Field, Axum
We hitched a ride to Axum. The driver seemed surly, and he drove around town twice looking for more passengers. Ed wondered with the price of petrol being what it was whether it was a cost effective measure. After his second turn of the small town, the drive gave up and drove swiftly out of town.
Once beyond the city limits, he became friendly and talkative. He said he knew a Chinese man who was an engineer working on the roads. There were many Chinese engineers in the country working on various infrastructure projects, and one of the first questions people asked us was if we were working in Ethiopia. We asked him what was in the back of the truck. He told us he transported beer from Gondar to Axum. Our conversation exhausted, we fell silent and watched the landscape pass by the window.
In two hours we were in Axum. The driver stopped at the edge of town to drop off coal to a client, then left us in front of the Africa hotel. The hotel looked deserted. An attendant told us the manager was preparing for a wedding, and ofered to show us a room. He lead us out into the courtyard and up a flight of stairs. A bird flew out from the bathroom as he opened the door, but the room was clean and we took it.
We ate a quick lunch at the hotel next door then walked west towards the archeological museum and stelae field. The museum was closed for lunch, but the deacon at the nearby St. Mary of Zion church was available and he took us a tour of the grounds. He lead us behind the new church and showed us a small chapel. Inside, the Ark of the Covenant was said to be interred. The setting was somewhat less dramatic than that of Raiders of the Lost Ark. The yard was wooded and serene. Birds chirped. People walked languidly past on the dirt road.
The deacon pointed to a bell tower standing in a small pool of water and told us that the Ark was once housed below a chapel where the tower now stood, but was moved in 1965. One person has seen the Ark, an elected attendant who stays in the chapel, but facsimiles are stored in the inner chambers of all the churches in Ethiopia.
According to the Kebre Negast, the Ark was brought to Ethiopia from Jerusalem by Menelek I, the son of King Solomon of Isreal and the Queen of Sheba. Once he returned to Ethiopia with the relic, he established a dynasty that would reign for the next 3,000 years.
What we saw in the city were mainly ruins. After touring the church grounds, we turned our attention to the northern stelae park, a field of granite obelisks erected some 2,000 years ago. King Ezana's stelae, leaning a bit to the side, greeted us at the entrance. Standing 24 meters in height, it's the tallest standing stelae. Nearby, the Great Stelae lay in pieces. At 33 meters, it would once have towered over the field, though some believe it had never stood; rather that it had fallen as it was being erected, some 1,600 years ago.
Outside the entrance, the Rome Stelae lay in pieces, still housed in the containers that had brought it back from Rome. Shipped to Italy in 1937 during the occupation and erected in the Piazza di Porta Capena, it had recently been returned and awaited re-erection.
As we explored the rest of the field, workers cleared hay around us. The sun brightened the golden grass. We walked gently upon it; the stalks were pointed and sharp. It was late in the afternoon when we left to get a drink on the terrace of the Yeha Hotel> En route, we passed the Queen of Sheba's bath where villagers gathered to draw water. We climbed a small hill to the hotel. The restaurant and terrace were empty. We ordered two Fantas and watched as the sun sank behind the fields. The shadows of the stelae grew, stretching towards but never quite reaching the mound upon which we stood.
