On March 10, 1997 the 800 year old Lalibela Cross was discovered to have gone missing from the church of Medhane Alem. This cross, which is made of solid gold is said to have bee the personal property of King Lalibela, and it is perhaps the most treasured artifact of the Ethiopian Church, more holy than anything in Jerusalem or Rome.
Nothing was heard of the whereabouts of the missing cross until two years laters, when it was noticed by customs officials in the luggage of an art dealer returning home to Brussels from Ethiopia. The Lalibela Cross was returned to its rightful place with a ceremony on May 1999.
I was there in Lalibela the day the cross was returned (graduate student in East African Archaeology.) It was an amazing experience watching the arrival of the plane, being swept up by the surge of residents along the streets and bottlenecking into the square for the ceremony (6 hours or so long!) I had to lift a young girl of maybe 7 years off the ground as we rushed the square entrance or she would have been trampled. The excitement was raw and everyone wanted to be a part of and witness the historical event. If I could find some of the news footage or photographs of the ceremony, I imagine I could see myself and my graduate student colleague in the crowd, roughly dead center. I found this blog while searching, actually :) The only way we could leave the square (got too claustrophobic) was by dropping to our hands and knees and crawling out through the space between legs. It was that tightly packed!
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