😇
Today, Ginbot ፲፩/11,
፳፻፲፰/2018
(May 19, 2026) marks the departure of St. Yared, the great Ethiopian
composer, Saint Yared, who disappeared at the age of 66.
😇 Saint Yared,
the legendary 6th-century Axumite composer credited with creating the
liturgical music and chant tradition (Zema) of the Ethiopian and
Eritrean Orthodox Churches, is believed by tradition to have
disappeared rather than died.
His disappearance is
surrounded by rich spiritual tradition:
• The Departure:
On May 19, 571 AD (Ginbot 11 on the Ethiopian calendar), after
serving the church and praising God, Yared sought to withdraw from
the world. According to hagiography, he stood before the Tabernacle
of Zion in Axum and prayed, after which he was raised above the
ground and transported away.
• The Location:
He is said to have departed to the desert and the mountains,
specifically living a life of fasting and prayer in the wilderness.
Some traditions state he spent his final days in the Debre Hawi
monastery in the northern mountains.
• Legacy: The
exact location of his grave remains unknown to this day. His
monumental contributions—including the development of the Digua
(hymn books) and a unique musical notation system—are commemorated
annually by the church on his feast day.
🎶
Long Before This Form of Musical Notation Began in The West,
There Was a Composer in Ethiopia
💭
“While Europe was still in the dark ages, Ethiopia has a fully
illustrated Bible„
“Empires
don't just conquer Land, they conquer Memory. Memory is power„
The Garima Gospels in
Ethiopia are believed to be the oldest illustrated Christian
manuscripts. Scholars previously dated the manuscripts to around
1100 A.D, but recent carbon dating has placed the documents to
somewhere between 330 and 650 A.D.
Abba Garima Monastery is an
Ethiopian Orthodox church, located around five kilometers east of
Adwa, Tigray.
❖ "After
surviving 1,500 years of human history in a remote monastery, the
Garima Gospels are now facing their most severe threat."
❖ “The war
in Tigray has inflicted more destruction on Ethiopia’s religious
and cultural heritage than anything since the invasions of Ahmad ibn
Ibrahim al-Ghazi.”
After
surviving 1,500 years of human history in a remote monastery, the
Garima Gospels are now facing their most severe threat.
When
a Canadian scholar first glimpsed the ancient Garima Gospels, carried
carefully into the sunlight by monks in a mountain monastery in
northern Ethiopia,
the pages were tattered and crumbling.
“The
parchment was so brittle that flakes fell to the ground at every
turn,” wrote Michael Gervers, a historian at the University of
Toronto, recalling his earliest encounter with the manuscript more
than 20 years ago.
Even
then he did not fully realize what he was seeing. Some experts now
believe it could be the world’s oldest intact version of
illuminated Christian scripture. Radiocarbon analysis revealed that
its pages date back as early as the fifth century, making it one of
the oldest manuscripts of any kind in the world. Its brilliant
colours and stunning illustrations make it even more valuable to
world culture.
Today,
after surviving 1,500 years of human history in a remote monastery,
the Garima Gospels are facing their most severe threat.
Historic
manuscripts, along with church icons and silver crosses, are among
the treasures that have been plundered by Eritrean and Ethiopian
soldiers, raising global alarm for Tigray’s cultural heritage.
Cut
off from the world by military clashes and telecommunications
shutdowns, the fate of the Abba Garima monastery and its spectacular
Garima Gospels is still unknown. But the area around the monastery is
controlled by soldiers who have looted systematically since the start
of the war. The fears are growing.
“It
is chilling to many of us to think that these Gospels and other
ancient artifacts are in the way of danger,” said Suleyman Dost, a
professor in the Near Eastern and Judaic Studies department at
Brandeis University in Massachusetts.
“These
Gospels are not only among the earliest complete texts of the
Christian scripture, but they also provide us with a rare glimpse
into the language, religion and history of ancient Ethiopia,” he
told The Globe and Mail in an e-mail.
“They
are truly part of the world heritage and constitute indispensable
sources for scholars of early Christianity, late antique Ethiopia and
even early Islam.”
The
Garima Gospels, bound and illustrated copies of the Four Gospels of
the New Testament written in the classical Ethiopian language Ge’ez,
are one of the treasures of the ancient Axumite kingdom, whose
heartland is now engulfed by the war zone in Tigray.
“The
war threatens countless invaluable remains from this period,
including inscriptions, religious buildings and manuscripts that have
been diligently preserved in monasteries for centuries,” Prof. Dost
said.
The
Axumite kingdom, whose territories extended across the Red Sea into
modern-day Yemen, was one of the great cultural and economic empires
of its time, a crossroads of early civilizations and one of the first
states to accept Christianity as state religion, in the early fourth
century, before even the Roman Empire. Its capital, Axum, is reputed
by tradition to be the home of the Ark of the Covenant – another
holy relic whose fate is unknown today.
“It
was the one territory which retained its Christianity without
external domination and has done so ever since,” Prof. Gervers
said.
“It
is the oldest free Christian culture in the world. And that culture
was centred in what is now Eritrea and Tigray. The world is only at
this point coming to recognize the importance of this area.”
The
Garima Gospels are older than more famous Western manuscripts such as
the Book of Kells, and a closer link to the original Greek gospels.
“They are just amazing in their artistic expertise, incomparable
even to early Gospel books that we have,” Prof. Gervers told The
Globe in an interview. “They are of utmost importance to Christian
culture as a whole. Their loss or displacement would be disastrous to
the cultural heritage of Judeo-Christianity.”
Prof.
Gervers has been documenting Ethiopian art and culture for decades,
photographing historic church manuscripts and creating a unique
database of about 70,000 digitized images, including the Garima
Gospels. With no sign of the Tigray war ending soon, his database is
becoming increasingly crucial. “We’re thankful that we were able
to document so much of this over the past 30 years,” he said.
Among
the most invaluable illustrations in the Garima Gospels, he said, are
an unparalleled image of the evangelist Mark, and a rare image of a
building that has been identified as the Old Temple in Jerusalem.
The
war in Tigray has inflicted more destruction on Ethiopia’s
religious and cultural heritage than anything since the invasions of
Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi, who burned churches and manuscripts
across the country in the 16th century, Prof. Gervers said.
He
and his colleagues are trying to monitor the antiquities markets, in
case any looters try to sell the manuscripts. “It would be an
offence to Christianity if the Garima Gospels ended up for sale
somewhere.” Even worse, soldiers could simply burn the manuscripts
“out of spite,” he said. But so far their fate is a mystery. “We
haven’t heard a word about it.”
Wolbert
Smidt, an ethnohistorian at Jena University in Germany who studies
Ethiopian culture and history, said he has received reports of
soldiers regularly searching churches and sometimes looting or
burning church relics, including rare parchment manuscripts that were
written by hand in late antiquity.
But
there is still hope, he says. During conflicts of past centuries, the
monks of Abba Garima carefully hid the Garima Gospels, possibly in
mountain caves. Today there is a chance that the monks may have
succeeded in hiding them again.
