Lake Tana monasteries

Fisherman in a Tankwa traditional canoe on Lake Tana
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Bahir Dar is on the shore of Lake Tana, it's quite a large town.  There are a number of ancient monasteries on the lakeshore and on the small islands on the lake.

It didn’t take very long to organize a boat trip to a few of the island monasteries for the next day. In the meantime we had a look around Bahir Dar. It’s got the usual scruffy African town feel to it, but the atmosphere is quite relaxed. In the evening, we sat out at one of the pavement bars for a couple of beers, people watching.

Paintings in Kidane Mihret Monastery
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In the morning we boarded our boat for the monastery tour. There were a few other tourists with us, I suspect altogether we might well have represented almost the entire tourist population of Bahir Dar that day, so few tourists had we seen so far.

We headed across the lake to the Zege Peninsula, where we visited Ura Kidane Mihret, probably the most famous church on the lake. Like most of the Lake Tana churches, it’s a large round building, built of stone clad in mud and straw. Inside the wall is another circular wall, inside which is a circular room, making three concentric rooms. The central room is the ‘holy of holies’, where the replica of the ark is kept,. Generally no-one other than the monks is allowed enter the holy of holies. In this church the wall of the holy of holies is decorated with wonderful paintings, depicting a variety of biblical scenes in a charming, almost cartoon-like style. The content is graphically violent throughout, despite the rather cutesy characters involved. Lots of beheading, people with limbs chopped off, that sort of thing. The earliest of the paintings date from the 16^th Century, the later from the 18^th Century. Niamh thought the style of the paintings reminded her of some of the Russian iconography we’d seen in St Petersburg.

Artwork at Kidane Mihret
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Bet Maryam was also on the same peninsula; it’s similar but not nearly as beautiful. The museum there was quite interesting, though.

Crossing to a nearby island we visited Kibran Gebriel. This monastery is men only, so the girls in the group were taken to another island in the meantime, to visit a different church. Kibran Gebriel is an unremarkable building, but a wonderfully chatty priest showed us round the museum, explaining all about the ancient books, crosses and crowns that are stored there. The books in particularly are amazing, made from the skin of goats (one goat = two pages, our priest explained) and several hundred years old. The priest propped open one book after another, talking through the illustrations and explaining some of the text.

Outside corridor in Kidane Mihret
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The last church, Debre Maryam, was perhaps a little pedestrian compared to the others, although we were quite entertained by the monk getting himself up in all his finery, ornamental umbrella included and displaying a 700-year old book for us.

On the way back to the pier, we passed a fisherman on his tankawa, a papyrus boat which looks a little like a cross between a canoe and a raft, strongly reminiscent of ancient Egyptian boats.