Rock-hewn churches of Lalibela

Ethiopia was one of the earliest nations to adopt Christianity, in the first half of the 4th century. According to local tradition the town now called Lalibela, traditionally known as Roha, was founded in 1137 by an Agew family called the Zagwa or Zagwe, and the churches were made under the Zagwe king Gebre Meskel Lalibela (r. c. 1181–1221), after whom the town is named. Tradition holds that before he came to the throne he was guided by Christ on a tour of Jerusalem and told to build a second Jerusalem in Ethiopia. Because the layout and names of the buildings are widely taken, above all by the local clergy, to represent Jerusalem, some experts date the present churches to the years after Saladin captured Jerusalem in 1187.

The churches drew on older traditions. Stuart Munro-Hay points to Aksumite influence: Biete Amanuel imitates in stone the wooden features still seen in ancient churches of Tigray and Eritrea, and the framed doors and windows seem to echo the stelae of Aksum. David Buxton found that two of them follow "with great fidelity of detail" the tradition of Debra Damo as modified at Yemrahana Kristos. Excavations have found pottery and animal remains of 900–1100, suggesting that the site was largely a secular settlement before King Lalibela made it a religious centre, and pre-Christian animal friezes at the nearby Washa Mikael cave, with Christian paintings above them, suggest a region still being Christianised.

The eleven churches stand at an altitude of around 2,480 metres, five north of the town's river Jordan, five south of it, and one, Biete Giorgis, apart, joined to the others by trenches. The northern churches are Biete Medhane Alem (House of the Saviour of the World), home to the Lalibela Cross; Biete Maryam, possibly the oldest; Biete Golgotha Mikael, known for its arts and said to contain the tomb of King Lalibela; Biete Meskel; and Biete Denagel. The southern, or eastern, group holds Biete Amanuel, possibly the former royal chapel; Biete Qeddus Mercoreus, which may have been a prison; Biete Abba Libanos; Biete Gabriel-Rufael, possibly a former royal palace; and Biete Lehem. The Church of Saint George, Biete Giorgis, is thought to be the most finely executed and best preserved.

Four of the churches are free-standing monoliths and seven share a wall with the mountain from which they were cut. Each is unique: Bet Golgotha has human figures in bas-relief, Bet Mariam colourful paintings of geometric designs and biblical scenes. Mouldings and string courses divide the larger shapes, and the pitched roof and linear mouldings of Biete Maryam suggest Syrian influence. Wells beside many of the churches draw on an artesian system that brings water up to the top of the ridge, and the whole site, linked by tunnels and trenches, forms a place of pilgrimage laid out to represent Jerusalem.

The churches were made by a subtractive process, in which space is created by removing material. With hammers and chisels the builders excavated trenches around the monolithic and semi-monolithic churches, and tunnels joining the groups, out of scoriaceous basalt, working from the top downward. The work is thought to have gone through three phases, and the churches are said to have taken 24 years to build. Their dating is not well established. Buxton, who set out the generally accepted chronology, reasoned that carving them must have taken longer than the few decades of Lalibela's reign and assumed that the work extended into the 14th century. David Phillipson, professor of African archaeology at Cambridge, has proposed that the churches of Merkorios, Gabriel-Rufael and Danagel were first carved between 600 and 800, as fortifications or palace structures of the Kingdom of Aksum, and that the king's name came to be attached to them after his death. The local historian Getachew Mekonnen credits Lalibela's wife, Queen Meskel Kibra, with having Biete Abba Libanos built as his memorial.

Who did the work has also been debated. Munro-Hay notes that many Coptic Egyptians came to Ethiopia in Lalibela's reign and may have helped, and travellers such as Manuel de Almeida and Hiob Ludolf credited Egyptian architects. Munro-Hay and Buxton held the foreign share to be largely decorative, Buxton stressing that the churches follow local prototypes of Aksumite origin.

The churches have long drawn Ethiopian Orthodox pilgrims, and to some Christians Lalibela is one of Ethiopia's holiest cities. The place was first named in a European publication on the Fra Mauro map, made in Venice in 1457–59, as Lalabeda. The Portuguese priest Francisco Álvares, who came with the Portuguese embassy to Dawit II in the 1520s, went twice to see the churches and swore by God that all he wrote of them was true, and that there was much more than he had written. Ramuso printed plans of several churches in his 1550 edition of Álvares's book, from drawings whose maker is unknown. Miguel de Castanhoso, a soldier who left Ethiopia in 1544, wrote that the churches were "attributed to angels" and that the work "appears superhuman".

Álvares found that many local people considered the churches mainly the work of foreigners. In 1882 the French explorer Achille Raffray was given a manuscript at Lalibela which he read as saying that the king and his wife brought some five hundred workers from Alexandria and Jerusalem; Monti della Corte (1940) found the translation almost completely wrong, and with the help of Arnold Van Lantschoot at the Vatican Library its three texts, in Coptic, Arabic and Geʽez, were shown to make no mention of foreign builders. Haile Selassie made a pilgrimage to the churches during the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, at considerable risk of capture, before returning to his capital in April 1936.

The churches have come through war more than once. According to the Futuh al-Habasha of Shihab al-Dīn, Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi burned one of the churches of Lalibela during his invasion of Ethiopia, lighting a fire in it before the gathered monks. Richard Pankhurst has doubted this, noting that the Royal Chronicles, which record Ahmad's laying waste to the district between July and September 1531, are silent on the churches; if a church was burned, he concluded, it was most likely Biete Medhane Alem, or else Gannata Maryam, east of Lalibela. Castanhoso reported that "the Moors", as he called the invaders, had tried and failed to destroy the churches with crowbars and gunpowder. Italian forces took the town in 1936, the Ethiopian People's Democratic Movement attacked it often during the Ethiopian Civil War, and in 2021 and 2023 it was fought over again, in the Tigray War and between the national army and Fano fighters.

The site was first included on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1978. Recent conservation has been flawed in execution. A restoration of Bet Gabriel-Rafael and Bet Golgotha-Mikael funded by the American Embassy has seen disagreement over its scope and poor communication between the Authority for Research and Conservation of Cultural Heritage (ARCCH), the local committee and the church. Four shelters funded by the EU were put up in 2008 over five of the churches as a temporary measure; they have stood far longer than intended and now threaten to collapse under their weight.

The churches of Lalibela, carved from within the earth out of "living rock", hold an important place in the history of rock-cut architecture and are known around the world. They were designed in contrast to the earlier monolithic churches of Ethiopia, and Phillipson sees in their Aksumite features a strong continuity with Aksumite cultural tradition, though not necessarily an Aksumite date. Related churches lie farther afield, among them the monastery of Ashetan Maryam and the Yemrehana Krestos Church, built in the Aksumite fashion within a cave. The whole of Lalibela is regarded as an important site for the ancient, medieval and post-medieval civilisation of Ethiopia.

The site remains in use by the Ethiopian Orthodox Church for daily worship and prayer, as a home for clergy and for the festivals of Genna, on 7 January, and Timkat, on 19 January, when services are accompanied by processions lasting several days, traditional music and rituals; each year it brings together more believers and religious leaders. Rulers have come to see it: Mohammad Reza Pahlavi with Emperor Haile Selassie in 1968, and Queen Juliana and Prince Bernhard the next year. Attacks during the civil war cut foreign tourism so far that by 1990 most visitors were Ethiopians. Three-dimensional scans of the churches are now available online, and the authority for cultural heritage has said that the ageing shelters over them must be removed.