Travel information on Security & Safety for visitors in Ethiopia

Category Archives: Gena

Ethiopian Pilgrims celebrate Christmas in Lalibela

Gena ceremony in Lalibela

Gena ceremony in Lalibela

It was very special this year as Ethiopian Pilgrims celebrated Gena -Ethiopian Christmas-  in Lalibela, a town which was taken by the TPF several times in recent months. Lalibela is the most holy place to celebrate Gena in all of Ethiopia, the new Jerusalem, built by the Saint King Lalibela at the end of the 12th century as an alternative for Ethiopians from making the dangerous journey to Jerusalem for Christmas. Each year thousands of pilgrims walk across country to celebrate Gena in a special ceremony above the churches

https://www.africanews.com/2022/01/07/after-fights-pilgrims-return-to-ethiopian-world-heritage-site-lalibela/

Rufael & Gabriel churches in Lalibela

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Lalibela, with its labyrinth of churches hewn out of the bedrock in the 12th century, has become the flagship of Ethiopian Tourism, and is often described as the 8th wonder of the world. 

We hope that this celebration at the beginning of 2022 will be the beginning of Tourism restarting in Ethiopia. Near to Lalibela, in the mountains a little to the south are a series of community owned guest houses were tourists have been trekking in the beautiful countryside for the last 10 years or more. I will be able to find out in the coming days when we can restart this community trekking.

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Melkam Gena

Gena ceremony in Lalibela

Today – 7th January – it is Christmas (known as Gena) in Ethiopia, and indeed across the Orthodox world. For Ethiopians it is the culmination of a 44 day long Advent fast (the second longest fast after the Lenten Fast that runs for 55 days up to Easter). But in Lalibela Gena will be celebrated tomorrow on 8th January – for this year (2012) is a leap year or a Markos year. In fact the additional day came at the end of 2011 (Ethiopian Year) – Pagumay had 6 days -one extra day, and so the new Ethiopian Year began on September 12. This means that MOST dates get put back a day in the western calendar so Kulubi Gabriel – (Tahsas 19) usually falls on 28th December – but in a this year it was on

Bale Wold church in Addis, crowds gather to see the Tabot (Tahsas 29)


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29th December. However Gena does not move date – except in Lalibela. The western and Ethiopian dates re-sync with the western leap day at the end of February (2020). Why?

Well in the Ethiopian calendar and in Christian tradition Mary became pregnant on a specific day (before the leap day) and she was pregnant for a specific number of days… so Christmas – the birth of Christ must be on the a day earlier in the Ethiopian calendar. So today is Tahsas 28 – not 29. Yet Tahsas 29 is the monthly celebration of the birth of Christ…

Anyway -when ever you celebrate it – Melkam Gena!

 

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Happy (Ferenji) Christmas – and the coming festivities in Ethiopia

Gena ceremony in Lalibela

The coming month is a busy one for festivals in Ethiopia.  The biggest dates in the calendar are Kulubi Gabriel (28th December), Gena (Ethiopian Christmas) – on 7th January and Timkat (some what confusingly referred to as Epiphany) on the 19th January. These events are heavily promoted in the tourist industry, but often without a great deal of understanding.

Many think that as a spectacle, Gena can be seen all over Ethiopia, but in fact there is a unique celebration

A Tabot being paraded

in Lalibela with Tabots [the core of the church, replicas of the Tablets of Stone given to Moses] coming out onto the rock early in the morning and dancing and mass is said. Several thousand pilgrims stream from the countryside into the mountain town in the days preceding Gena, and melt away in the days that follow. Many will walk several hundred kilometres. In addition to this many Ethiopia pilgrims will descend on the town in buses from all over the country. This in itself is part of the tourist draw, to see the fervour, and the pilgrims camping out around the churches. Over the last twenty years tourist numbers attending Gena in Lalibela has swollen from scores of tourists to hundreds of tourists, and now will be well over a thousand!

The result is a bit ugly.  Too many tourists jockeying for position to get the epic photos. Their guides struggling to get them into position, prepared to muscle others, including pilgrims, out of the way.  In terms of visiting the churches, later on Timkat day or the day before, the scrum down to get into churches designed to hold some 20 worshipers is far worse than undignified.

Worshippers jump into the Fasilides baths

Timkat is however a pan-Ethiopian festival, and even celebrated across the Orthodox world in different ways. It is perhaps the festival that most marks out Ethiopia as unique. The word Timkat means Baptism (in Ge’ez, Amharic and Tigrinya), and the day is commemorating the baptism of Jesus by John in the Jordan River. In each Orthodox church across the country, the tabot comes out the night before and and spends the night in what is usually a scenic location with nearby water. When a tabot comes out it is a ceremonial procession with singing, ululating, dancing and much joy. On the Timkat morning there is a mass service and water is blessed, before a joyful and vigorous splashing of the water as every one seeks to get water on them – for it is now holy water. Afterwards the tabot is once more processed back to the church, and people will go home and feast.

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However the majority of tourists believe that they should see this ceremony in Gondar, Lalibela or Axum.  In Gondar there is a ceremonial bath built by Fasilidas which makes a lovely backdrop for the ceremony, or it would if there were not so many tourists. In Lalibela the location is a modern cement water pool several hundred meters below the churches compound, and in Axum it is a large pool (built in recent times). What does make the ceremony special is the number of churches on the pageant.  However I don’t think this outweighs the negative effect of the over tourism. Every hotel is fully booked, and once full they take additional people camping in their grounds, so as in Lalibela  at Gena you are faced with the ugly side of over tourism.

So where can people see Timkat and Gena? Well as noted Timkat is everywhere. So go somewhere where you can have a connection to the local church. I recommend the Tesfa Community treks. Here you can celebrate Timkat with the community and really will get a sense of what the holiday means. Alternatively you can see it in Addis, where the small number of foreigners is swamped by the thousands of worshippers following their parish church to the celebration sport, which in the N.E of Addis is Jan Meda. Here you can see the ceremony and see how much it means to the people of Addis.

Bale Wold church in Addis, crowds gather to see the Tabot

And Gena, well there is no substitute for witnessing the pilgrims and special celebration in Lalibela, but where ever you are on Gena eve, you can ask your guide to take you to a local church that night and witness the parishioners coming to celebrate the birthday of Jesus. They will have been fasting for one month in preparation for this day.  In some special churches dedicated to Bale Exyabier perhaps, the tabot will come out then next morning. One such church is adjacent to Selassie in central Addis, and here again the ululating and excitement at the coming out of the tabot can be felt.

Community celebrate at Festival in Meket

There are many days in January where tabot come out in special locations. The 26th January is the commemoration of the martyrdom of St George, when his bones were ground to dust – Sebreatesemu Giyorgis. This is a big day in Lalibela and the surrounding area, and great celebrations can be seen with few foreigners present (if any). There are other days too – Selassie  on 15th January, Cherkos – 23rd January and Asteryo Mariam on 29th January.  There are churches up and down the country where the tabot will be processed out of the church on these days – and you can feel and see the age old mystery of the tabot, and the devotion of people to it.

Find out how you can enjoy this holy season in Ethiopia away from the mass of tourists with the help of the Tesfa Tours team. We can design a great trip to experience these unique days or others like them, enabling you to experience the real Ethiopia.

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Melkam Gena – Happy Christmas

Priest holding traditional taper

The churches are all celebrating mass this morning across Ethiopia and the Orthodox world. It is Christmas morning and the fast that started 42 days before in late November is now over. Today is a feast day and all kinds of meat will be prepared for the celebrations.

Lalibela is the place to celebrate Gena, with thousands of pilgrims walking into the holy town from great distances to participate in the Christmas morning celebrations above Bete Mariam church. Many hundreds of tourists will be there to witness this spectacle.
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Tesfa Tours wishes all who are celebrating today and very happy Christmas.

Gena ceremony in Lalibela

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Christmas is coming .. in Ethiopia

Melkam Gena / Happy Christmas

Sheep are bought into Addis for sale for holidays

Sheep are bought into Addis for sale for holidays

Christmas is coming and sheep is for the pot.
Onions need cutting and enjara pan is hot.
If you can’t afford a sheep a chicken will do.
If you can’t afford a chicken then God bless you.

This adaptation tells a few home truths about festivals in Ethiopia such as Gena:
mountains of onions are peeled, chopped fine and put in the pot. Enjara bread (pancakes) is baked on the eve of Gena with a big pile ready for the feast. People using electricity in the cities are nervous of power cuts or low power meaning the pan does not

Chickens for sale on street corners

Chickens for sale on street corners

get hot enough. And after the long fast that precedes Gena, everyone wants to eat meat. Best is to buy a sheep, but prices of sheep ahead of festivals has soared in recent years. A small sheep would not cost over $100 USD, for many that is a months salary or more. But a Doro wot- spicy chicken stew – is a favourite for the holiday. Yet even a chicken would cost around $10-15USD. So there are many families who will not be able to afford a chicken this holiday.

In most of Europe and the West, Christmas is the big family day, with presents, special foods, traditions to be followed. For many they will go to church and remember that it is the celebration of the birth of Jesus, but for many more it has become a feast of consumerism and consumption.

In the Ethiopian Orthodox church, the traditional church in Ethiopia and the one that forms the framework of much of the culture of the country, there are several very important festivals throughout the year: Easter, Christmas, Timkat (the celebration of the baptism of Christ) and Meskal being the most important. Add to this new Year, which falls on 11th September in most years, and is very important to many although it is less of a religious day, and you can see that there are a good number of festivals through the year.
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Bale Wold church in Addis, crowds gather to see the Tabot

Bale Wold church in Addis, crowds gather to see the Tabot on Gena/ Christmas day.

Feasting is part of all these holidays. It is also family time, with people returning to their mother’s home to enjoy real home cooking. Church is often attended during the night on the eve of the holiday, although with days like Timkat the church procession is a big part of the day’s events.

So where should you go to see Gena?  If you attend any Orthodox church the night before you will witness the service and the mass. In Addis the church of Bale Wold by Selassie celebrates

Gena ceremony in Lalibela

Gena ceremony in Lalibela, the most famous place to spend Christmas in Ethiopia.

Christmas on Christmas morning.  If you have Ethiopian friends they will undoubtably invite you round to partake in the feast. Do bring round gifts of food: coffee, biscuits, fruit, cake, bottle of wine and the like are all acceptable presents.

Gena is most famous in Lalibela. But if you have not booked it you are too late. Accommodation fills up, (so there will be no room at the inn) and flights become full.  Hotels and guides inflate their usual fees, so in addition it does become expensive.

 

 

 

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Merry Christmas / Melcam Gena

Ox stops the traffic

In downtown Addis an Ox has broken free from its new owner and is terrorising the traffic. (He chased my car after I took the photo!)

On the eve of a big holiday like Christmas, (Gena in Amharic) livestock are a common sight in the streets as animals make are lead away to become the next day’s stew.

Christmas in the Ethiopian Orthodox calendar falls on  January 7th, 13 days after western Christmas. However in Lalibela the church has ruled that it is Christmas on January 8th in a following the Ethiopian leap year.
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An Ethiopian leap year has an extra day  on the last day of the year – on 11 September (as happened in 2015)  so the new year starts on Sept 12 and all dates are one day out until 29th February. The 8th January this year (2016) is the Tahsas 29 in the Ethiopian Calendar, which is the monthly festival for the birth of Christ. So in Lalibela Christmas moves in the western calendar date to stay consistent with the Ethiopian date (as with all holidays that fall from 11 Sept  – 29 Feb). But for the rest of the country the date slips back to Tahsas 28 (today) because they start counting from the date at which Gabriel announced that Mary was pregnant back in March in the previous year, and as she was pregnant for a fixed number of days … so the date is one day early every 4th year.

When ever you celebrate Christmas, we wish you a Merry Christmas and a good feast. Lets hope that Ox was not to tough!!

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Tesfa Tours New Calendars are ready

Every year we produce a calendar showcasing the Tigray and the Wollo communities. They start in September and end in August. This years calendar is now ready.

2007 Calendar promo.jpg  If you have not seen it before it is a must for anyone living or working here, or interested to visit Ethiopia.

1/ See how the Ethiopian Calendar is so different from the western Calendar. The Ethiopian dates are clearly marked in red along side the western dates.

2/ The major Saints days are shown – you will see there is a saints day almost every day of the month (and I only show the major ones that I chose to show!) If living in Addis you will know why large crowds of people are congregating in white gabis around a church area.

3/ The Annual saints day festivals are noted too – such as Hedar Mikael on the 21st Nov (the major St Michaels day) when rubbish is burned across the country. These are very big celebrations and in many cases the tabots will come out of the church with great celebration and procession. Use these big festivals when planning your holiday –

4/ Know in advance the Ethiopian holidays: Meskal, Gena (Ethiopian Christmas), Timkat (Celebrates the Baptism of Jesus 0f a really big festival), Orthodox Easter (often different dates to western Easter) etc.

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6/ Read the commentary on the bottom of each month and understand a little more about why, what , when etc.

7/ Enjoy the fabulous photographs – all taken from community tourism treks in Wollo and Tigray – 11 photos from guests this year – thanks to all who contributed. This should entice you book a trek if you have not already done so.

8/ Support the community tourism development with your contribution. We are suggesting 200 etb per calendar this year

Copies are available from our offices in front of Sandford School and a number of distribution points across the city. We will also post abroad if you can cover the postage cost.  Please let us know if you are interested to receive a calendar – calendars@tesfatours.com

 

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