Above: Scholar Marilyn Heldman held a similar lecture at
UCLA in 2006.

By Tadias Staff

Published: Wednesday, February 25, 2009

New York (Tadias) – Leading Ethiopian art historian Marilyn Heldman, author of African Zion: The Sacred Art of Ethiopia, will hold a lecture on Friday, February 27th, at the National Museum of African Art (950 Independence Ave., Washington, DC, 20560). She will discusses Lalibela, the world-famed pilgrimage site composed of churches carved from the living rock in the mountains of Lasta.

Lalibela is one of Ethiopia’s historical cities and is almost completely Ethiopian Orthodox Christian. The city was intended to be a New Jerusalem in response to the capture of Jerusalem by Muslims, and many of its historic buildings take their name and layout from buildings in Jerusalem.

From the 16th to the middle of the 19th centuries, virtually the whole of the Middle East was under the suzerainty of the Ottoman Empire. When one of the Zagwe kings in Ethiopia, King Lalibela (1190-1225), had trouble maintaining unhampered contacts with the monks in Jerusalem, he decided to build a new Jerusalem in Ethiopia. In the process he left behind one of the true architectural wonders of the world.

Above: Lalibela. This image is licensed under
Creative Commons Attribution.

Above: Lalibela. This image is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution.

Above: Lalibela. This image is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution.

If you go:
Lecture by Marilyn Heldman

Venue: National Museum of African Art
Time: Friday, Feb 27 12:00p
Location: Washington, DC,
950 Independence Ave., Washington, DC, 20560