Post-Millennial Observances
by ASH Smyth
September 2023
In celebration of the Meskel festival, ASH Smyth recalls his trip to Ethiopia’s Camelot, some 16 years ago.
If New Year festivities are always anticlimactic, then millennium parties are most certainly the worst.
I speak with some authority on this: for while the rest of the world—including me—had celebrated The Millennium on January 1st, 2000 AD (yes, yes, or 2001, for those geeks who like to argue with good layman’s sense), the new Ethiopian millennium did not begin until September 12th, 2007, initiating a year of commemorations that would, it was hoped, bring many visitors to the country—and giving me the chance to go through the whole damn sorry thing again.
Ethiopia’s New Year falls at this time thanks to their thirteen-month calendar, a hangover from a shared Egyptian-Coptic legacy (in which the fresh start was traditionally connected to the Nile flood). The Ethiopians have also been seven full years adrift from the rest of the world since about 500 AD, when the Roman Church recalculated the birth of Christ, something that was flatly ignored by the Coptic church in Africa.
One minor result is that tourists can enjoy the fleeting pleasure—as the joke goes in Addis Ababa—of being able to feel seven years younger. Another was providing me with an excuse to visit Ethiopia, back when I naively thought that one could travel to an interesting place and then get paid to write about it interestingly afterwards.
The dawning of the Third Millennium in Addis having turned out, boringly, to involve little more than beer, municipal fireworks and derivative reggae, I was relieved to discover that I would still be around to catch the ‘must see’ Meskel festival—and opted to witness it from the ancient and priestly capital of Gonder, an atmospheric, heritage-rich town, often referred to as ‘Africa’s Camelot’.
“The Ethiopians have been seven full years adrift from the rest of the world since about 500 AD.”
Celebrated across the country for 1,600 years on September 27th (or Meskerem 17th, in the Ethiopian/Julian calendar) Meskel—the finding of ‘the true cross’™—is one of the most important festivals in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church year. And if then-Prime Minister Meles Zenawi had rhetorically dedicated the whole year to the ongoing millennial festivities, some ultra-Orthodox Ethiopians had very actually set aside the entire month to celebrate Meskel.
The history of the festival is neither brief nor often told the same way twice.
Meskel means ‘cross’ in Ge’ez (which is to Ethiopia’s Amharic language what Latin is to modern-day Italian). On March 19th, 326 AD, Helena, mother of the Roman Emperor Constantine, assisted by Bishop Macarius of Jerusalem, supposedly found the remnants of the cross buried in the mound of Golgotha. One account says she was excavating in the temple that Hadrian had built on the site; another that Helena sprinkled incense onto a bonfire, and the smoke plunged groundwards, revealing the burial place. Then—according to narrative preference—onlookers celebrated by lighting fires and dancing; or, Helena lit the fires herself, as beacons to relay the glad tidings to Constantinople.
Undoubtedly the pious Helena would have been delighted at her elevation to patron saint both of archaeologists and of converts. She may have been less pleased, however, about the treatment of her legacy by her son’s court biographer, Eusebius. While his Vita Constantini records her expedition to Palestine, Eusebius inexplicably fails to mention her rather momentous discovery.
Christianity has been the state religion in Ethiopia since the beginning of the fourth century—though there is a legend that Christians reached Ethiopia during the time of the apostles—making it the second oldest officially Christian country in the world, after Armenia. Early coinage, minted by King Azana, was the first in Christendom to bear the imprint of the cross, and Ethiopia was one of the earliest places to have the Bible translated into a local language (from Greek into Ge’ez, in the late fifth century).
Gonder
Over the next ten centuries Ethiopia became a bulwark of Christianity in Africa (inspiring the medieval myths of Prester John’s African Christian kingdom in the process), and, sporadically, the Ethiopian kings did indeed ride out in defence of other Christian populations. By the fifteenth century, the patriarch of Alexandria felt obliged to reimburse Ethiopia for expenses incurred while protecting Egypt’s Copts from their Muslim neighbours. Having no interest in the promised riches, however, the Emperor Dawit I (r. 1382-1413) asked instead for four pieces of the ‘true cross’ which were kept in Alexandria. Whether he did this out of genuine piety, or with a mind to the obvious propaganda dividend for a dynasty claiming Solomonic lineage is unclear. But the pieces duly made their way to Dawit’s Ethiopian Highland domain, where they were reportedly kept at Amba Geshen, a rock-hewn fortress-treasury topped with a rough cross shape (a more symbolic architectural idiosyncrasy in Ethiopia—where many churches are octagonal—than it would seem on a trip round Europe).
Wherever the pieces of holy charcoal ended up, their arrival in Ethiopia was instrumental in providing the Ethiopian church with its own motivation for celebrating the Meskel festival. Every town has a Meskel Square, and several are famous for their celebrations: in Addis, the Patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church leads the celebrations in front of hundreds of thousands of people.
In Gonder, the chanting had been audible all night, from churches all over town, and now the crowds were packing out the massive central square. The blind, lame and destitute mill about in the hope of festive goodwill. Able-bodied late-comers climb trees in the hope of a decent view—but try as I might, I could not persuade the hospitable townsfolk from ushering this obvious tourist towards a premium vantage point. From here, I could see, in the centre of a giant, painted Maltese cross, a 20ft pyre with a cruciform pinnacle, brightly decked out with yellow daisies. Countless smaller cross-burnings had already filled the morning air with smoke, but this one would provide the grand finale, the re-enactment of St Helena’s Levantine pyrotechnics.
The music started up in earnest. Acolytes and junior priests danced through some aspects of the liturgy and sang through others, backed by the sawing of the single-string masenko violin. There were scriptural readings, and long speeches full the names of kings, a reminder of the inextricable histories of the Ethiopian church and state. The medieval city walls echoed to the rumble of goat-skin drums and the clash of sistrums, and the early sun flashed against elaborately-embroidered vestments.
At last, in a hush, the banners—great Ethiopian flags—were pulled down off the wood, and the pyre blessed. The priests stepped back. Smoke began to rise, and thousands of onlookers started to dance the demera (‘bonfire’) anti-clockwise around the burning pyre, filling the air with their ‘hoye hoye’s. Everyone was hoping the cross would topple auspiciously in the direction of his house. And when it did (towards the east of the city), a frenzy of brave souls leaped into the cinders to grab charred souvenirs, and joyously mark ashen crosses on their foreheads.
If you ask why Meskel is celebrated in September when Helena supposedly found the cross in March, you will again hear various stories. Some dodge the quandary by saying that though the discovery took place in March, the commemorative church that Helena built in Jerusalem was only consecrated six months later. Alternatively, there is the Book of Saints explanation, whereby the faithful are instructed to worship in September because a knees-up in March would conflict with Lenten fasting.
New Year in Ethiopia is traditionally a family affair; but Meskel is an all-purpose public extravaganza. Beyond its specific, Christian, commemorative importance, it is also a hangover from an ancient pagan ritual to mark the ending of the rainy season: a time when, not coincidentally, the fields turn yellow with the ‘Meskel’ daisy.
A version of this article was previously printed in History Today
