Seminar "Sacred Mobility", by Alebachew Birru and Olivia Adankpo-Labadie

Centering the façade of the late twelfth/early thirteenth-century hewn church of Beta Maryam (Lalibela, Ethiopia) is a curious window. Consisting of a pair of arched apertures crowned with a quatrefoil oculus, it closely resembles a Gothic tracery window. Rather than seeing this resemblance as coincidental, we understand this form as a conspicuous borrowing of the Gothic style by Ethiopian royalty, likely introduced during a later Medieval restoration of the church complex in the fourteenth or fifteenth century.

This motif did not travel the 5500 kilometers separating Ethiopia from the Île-de-France on its own, however. Rather, we argue that this borrowing of a Gothic form was likely understood in its Ethiopian context as a symbol of Mamluk Egyptian royal iconography. At that time, Gothic spolia—pilfered from Crusader churches—and their local imitations in the form of lancets, oculi, and portals were conspicuously used on the facades of royal buildings in Cairo, the very city where Ethiopian archbishops were appointed and to which numerous diplomatic delegations were dispatched.

As such, we argue that the Gothic window at Lalibela was, in its Ethiopian setting, not incidental. It was perceived as yet another dynastic Mamluk symbol, appropriated by Ethiopian monarchs to legitimize their own authority and to authorize their appropriation of the earlier Lalibela complex for the reigning Solomonic dynasty.

 

Alebachew BIRRU got his PhD from the University of Toulouse, France in 2020. Since then, he has been serving as an Assistant Professor of Archaeology and Heritage Studies at Debre Berhan University (DBU), Ethiopia. He also served as an Associate Dean of the Office of Internationalization and Partnerships of DBU. He was a fellow at the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies  (ITATTI), Florence, Italy in 2023. He has also been a 2023/24 AfOx fellow of the University of Oxford, UK. His particular area of research focuses on the archaeology and History of the Central Highlands of Ethiopia from the 10th to the 16th century.