Axum

I had been travelling for three weeks in Ethiopia before I reached Axum, and I was tired in the bone-deep way that comes from too many overnight buses and too much altitude adjustment. I arrived in the city late afternoon and walked directly to the field of stelae — the great carved obelisks — because I had read enough to know I should not wait until morning. The tallest that still stands is twenty-three metres of solid granite, carved to resemble a multi-storey building with false windows and a door, the seams of the fictional architecture so precise that from twenty metres away it reads as a real structure. I stood in front of it for longer than I can properly account for.

Axum was the capital of the Aksumite Empire, which at its peak in the fourth century AD controlled territories across what is now Eritrea, Sudan, Yemen, and Somalia — one of the four great powers of the ancient world, alongside Rome, Persia, and China. The obelisks were grave markers for the empire’s rulers, and the largest — now fallen and broken into sections by a collapse at some point in history — would have stood thirty-three metres if upright, taller than any monolith produced by any other ancient culture anywhere. The engineering of how they were carved, transported across the landscape, and erected remains a matter of active academic debate that nobody has convincingly resolved.

The city makes a further claim that is either a matter of faith or fact depending on your point of view: that the original Ark of the Covenant, the chest Moses carried through the desert containing the stone tablets of the law, is currently held in a chapel in the grounds of the Church of Saint Mary of Zion and guarded by a single monk appointed for life who is permitted to leave only to visit the nearby reservoir. I visited the church compound and stood at the outer wall of the chapel. The monk inside was not visible. The chapel has no windows. The Ark, if it is there, remains the most successfully kept secret in the world.

What is unambiguously real is the church’s centrality to Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity. The current cathedral was built on King Haile Selassie’s order in 1955 and stands next to the ruins of a much older structure, possibly the first church built in sub-Saharan Africa, dating from the fourth century when King Ezana converted the Aksumite Empire to Christianity. Women are not permitted inside the new cathedral, which is a point of genuine tension and not mine to resolve, but the historical weight of the site is extraordinary regardless of how you feel about the access policy.

The town around all this is small and quiet and slightly stunned-looking, in the way that towns carrying this much history sometimes seem to carry it as a burden. There are local restaurants serving tibs and injera, a few guesthouses, and a small museum with Aksumite coinage and inscriptions that gives the stelae better context than any guide I hired. I spent two days there and felt I had barely started. There are tombs below the field that have barely been excavated. The palace ruins sit in a neighbourhood of ordinary houses, the ancient stones incorporated into garden walls without ceremony, which is somehow more moving than any amount of fencing or signage would be.

When to go: October to March, during the dry season in the Tigray region. Flying into Axum from Addis Ababa takes under two hours and saves three days of overland travel — given the quality of what you find at the destination, this is not a place to arrive exhausted.