Debre Libanos

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See also Debre Libanos (Eritrea) for another monastery of the same name.

Debre Libanos is a monastery in Ethiopia, lying northwest of Addis Ababa in the Oromia Region.

The abbot of Debre Libanos, called the Ichege, was the second most powerful official in the Ethiopian Church after the Abuna. In the reign of Emperor Fasilides, after invading Oromos had ravaged the monastery's lands in Shewa the Emperor granted the Ichege his palace at Azazo, where the various Ichege lived.^[1]

[edit] History

It was founded in the thirteenth century by Saint Tekle Haymanot, although the buildings have been repeatedly rebuilt. It suffered great destruction during the invasion of Ahmad Gragn when one of his followers, Ura'i Abu Bakr, set it afire 21 July 1531, despite the attempts of its community to ransom the church.^[2] Although the Ichege intervened to protect the Gambos during the reign of Sarsa Dengel,^[3] the buildings were not completely rebuilt until after the visit of Emperor Iyasu the Great in 1699.^[4]

Following the attempted assassination on his life on 19 February 1937, governor Rodolfo Graziani believed the monastery's monks and novices were involved in this attack, and unwilling to wait for the results of the official investigation, ordered Italian colonialists to massacre the inhabitants of this monastery. On 21 May of that year, 297 monks and 23 laymen were killed; a memorial tomb stands to them.^[5]

Emperor Haile Selassie notes in his autobiography that while he was governor of the district of Selale, during the reconstruction of the church at Debre Libanos, an inscribed gold ring was found in the excavations, which he personally delivered to then Emperor Menelik II.^[6] As recently as 1961, Haile Selassie ordered a new church be built on the site of Tekle Haymanot's tomb, near the cave where he lived, and whose holy water is a focus for pilgrims.

[edit] References

1. ^ Richard R.K. Pankhurst, History of Ethiopian Towns (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1982), p. 111. ISBN 3-515-03204-5
2. ^ Sihab ad-Din Ahmad bin 'Abd al-Qader, Futuh al-Habasa: The conquest of Ethiopia, translated by Paul Lester Stenhouse with annotations by Richard Pankhurst (Hollywood: Tsehai, 2003), pp. 186-193.
3. ^ Richard Pankhurst, The Ethiopian Borderlands (Lawrenceville: Red Sea Press, 1997), p. 266
4. ^ Pankhurst, Borderlands, p. 312
5. ^ A more complete account of the events known in Ethiopia as "Yekatit 12" is chapter 14 of Anthony Mockler's Haile Selassie's War (New York: Olive Branch, 2003).
6. ^ Haile Selassie, My Life and Ethiopia's Progress, 1974 (Chicago: Frontline Distribution International, 1997), p. 27.