15/1-17/1
Our Axum hotel was one of the best situated, neither on a busy town street nor a long way outside, but overlooking, and a short walk from, the stelae field. We arrived in time to see the sunset from the terrace outside the restaurant – though I must say, Ethiopian sunsets are not as spectacular as the best of Greenwich Peninsula, lack of cloud making them rather plain. Perhaps it is different in the rainy season.
Breakfast was a gloomy affair. Not only because we were told to be down at 7 and didn’t see food until 7:20 – bread, honey and peanut butter, with a choice of freshly cooked eggs. Some had brought their phones to catch up on yesterday’s big Brexit vote. Twice as many voted against the proposed deal as in favour. Not unexpected, but where do we go from here?
Slightly cheered by vervet monkeys playing on the patio and swinging in the trees, we prepared for a day’s sightseeing. As we walked down to the stelae field, we stopped every few steps to investigate yet another strange bird. Ashu knows almost all of them by name.
We can see the stelae from the hotel patio, from benches donated in memory of a young man who campaigned for the Italian government to return a stele stolen by the Italian government.
The field was still inhabited until 1980 when it was declared a World Heritage Site. Since then, archaeologists have found a mausoleum underneath the largest stele, which probably broke on erection.
The museum, where no photos are allowed, makes a good introduction to Axum as the cradle of civilization in the first millennium AD (though farmers were in the area at least by 700 BC). Archaeology and ornithology make a welcome break from Brexit!
On the hill overlooking the hotel, we visited two ruined buildings, perhaps built as tombs for the kings Gabre Muskal and Khaleb. The latter was the first king to abdicate, and finished his life as a hermit. There may have been a secret tunnel down to the town. Lower down was the original stone inscribed by King Ezana in the third century in Ge’ez (the ancient language still used in liturgy), Sabaean and Greek, discovered by three farmers in 1980.
The bus then took us to the reconstructed walls of Dugur palace, attributed to the Queen of Sheba but certainly much more recent – fifth or sixth century AD. Two of the many rooms can be identified as kitchen and shower room respectively.
Opposite the palace, there are some much smaller stelae, grave-markers for less important people.
After lunch, and stops for banks and post office, we visited St Mary of Zion: the overgrown ruins of the fourth century church, a museum, and the modern cathedral. There is another church, 17th century I think, which only men are allowed to enter, and the holy of holies containing the “original” Ark of the Covenant, which only the custodian is allowed to enter, but we did not get even an exterior view of these.
We left Axum the next morning to begin our visit to the rock-hewn churches of Tigrai province.
emeritablog: life after work 