When Father Gebretsadik heard that war was coming to Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region, his first thought was where to hide the Garima Gospels. At around 1,500 years old, these brilliantly illustrated manuscripts are believed to be the oldest complete examples of their type on Earth. For centuries, Garima’s Orthodox monks have kept them safely hidden in a hilltop monastery, tucked away in the mountains that roll off to the east of Adwa, where Ethiopian armies defeated Italian invaders in 1896.
In late November 2020, under the cover of darkness, Father Gebretsadik took the Gospels out of the Garima Monastery and into hiding for the first time in recorded history. The Gospels were kept in their cases — book bags stitched from thick brown leather — and carried down the monastery’s winding stone steps out into the night.
Father Gebretsadik is tall and slight, dressed in the long black robes typical of Ethiopia’s Orthodox monks. He has a deep voice and a stoical face, the even line of his mouth partially obscured by a salt-and-pepper beard.
“We had no time to prepare,” he told me. “We had to move quickly.”
For the next two years, Garima would be almost entirely cut off from the outside world and, for some time, the fate of the Garima Gospels would remain unknown.
The Garima Monastery has survived centuries of upheaval — from Ethiopia’s imperial wars and Italian colonial invasions to waves of repression by the military dictatorship that overthrew Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974. In times of great danger, generations of Garima’s monks have kept the Gospels safe inside the monastery, where they were protected by the power of St. Garima and by the labyrinth of the surrounding mountains.
It is not clear why, after so many centuries of keeping the Gospels safe inside the monastery, the monks decided the Tigray war posed a new kind of threat. Perhaps it was the shadow of the border war, the cause of so much bitterness between Tigrayans and their Eritrean neighbors, two communities that share much by way of language, religion and culture. Eritrea was a province of Ethiopia just north of Tigray before becoming independent in the early 1990s. A bloody border war raged between 1998 and 2000, killing perhaps 100,000 people. The peace deal that ended the active stage of the war was never implemented and violence simmered along the borderlands for another 18 years. An uneasy status quo took hold, often described as a situation of “no war, no peace.”
When Abiy Ahmed became Ethiopia’s prime minister in 2018, he seemed to put a definitive end to the border war, a feat that would win him the Nobel Peace Prize. But the peace deal was quickly revealed for what it was — a strategic pact between an insurgent prime minister determined to unseat Tigrayan power from his former political party, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), and Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki, who blamed Tigray’s leaders for his country’s status as a global pariah.
Late on the night of Nov. 3, 2020, while the world’s attention was fixed on the presidential election in the United States, the Tigray war erupted after months of escalating tensions between Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), trying to hold on to federal power, and Abiy Ahmed, intent on consolidating power around himself. Eritrean soldiers quickly joined in Abiy’s fight against their mutual foe. Tigray was placed under siege and a telecommunications blackout was imposed for nearly two years.
Father Gebretsadik said that when he heard that Eritrean soldiers had crossed into Tigray, he knew nothing and no one would be spared the devastation that was to come. But the monks said there were other signs, too. The crops around Garima grew poorly that year and then were ravaged by locusts — great billowing swarms of them swept across the highlands in the months leading up to war. Then there was the hate speech, blasted from megaphones and spread across the internet, as political and religious leaders across Ethiopia compared Tigrayans to “demons” and “weeds” to be exorcised and excised from the earth.
Just two weeks into the war, the monks’ worst fears came to pass — Eritrean forces had reached Abba Garima, over 24 miles south of their border. When they entered the monastery, they took everything they could, from priests’ mobile phones to herds of local livestock, “teff” flour stores and farming equipment. What they couldn’t take, they destroyed.
For the next two years, Eritrean soldiers used Garima periodically as a base from which to launch attacks against the Tigray Defense Forces (TDF), the people’s army that emerged over the course of 2021 to fight against the region’s attackers. In November 2022, just days before a peace deal was signed, 113 civilians were executed by retreating Eritrean soldiers, according to testimony from 16 eyewitnesses and records kept by Garima’s monks. Their corpses were left unburied for three days. These atrocities have gone largely unreported.
This Garima massacre has deepened a sense of absence that has settled over the community despite the end of the war. Across the hills, dozens of stone houses stand empty, gardens and farmland lie fallow, livestock numbers have been decimated and households are running out of food. In my conversations with them, villagers and holy men alike wondered aloud why they were abandoned by St. Garima, their historic protector and most important patron, in their hour of greatest need.
Ifirst visited the Garima Monastery in January 2024, just over a year after the peace agreement put an end to one of the deadliest conflicts of the 21st century. At least 600,000 people are believed to have been killed between 2020 and 2022. A tenuous peace has held but the Garima Gospels are yet to return to their monastic home. Father Gebrehiwot, another of Garima’s resident monks, told me that the war was like “fire burning beneath a layer of ash,” liable to erupt again at any time.
Tourism, like much else in the region, has all but dried up. In January, I found myself alone in the back of a 12-seater tour bus speeding along the highway that links the historic cities of Axum and Adwa, past burned-out skeletons of vehicles and crumbling buildings. When my translator and I arrived at Abba Garima, the little museum at the foot of the monastery steps was empty, dust collecting on its shelves and clouding its windowpanes.
The monks were apologetic. Had I come before the war, they could have shown me the monastery’s collection of treasures from the Axumite Empire, which, at its height in the 5th century, stretched from Ethiopia and Eritrea into Yemen and southern Arabia. But these, too, were hidden away along with the Garima Gospels and had not yet been returned.
The Garima Gospels are the earliest known translations of the testaments of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John into the Ethiopic liturgical language of Geez.
Garima’s monks believe the Gospels were penned by “Abune” (“St.”) Garima himself, one of nine saints said to have brought monasticism to Ethiopia in the 5th or 6th centuries — a time when Christianity was only just starting to spread across the ancient world. The Gospels’ pages contain stylized depictions of the four evangelists, a mode of visual storytelling that became the norm for the “illuminated” texts that spread across the early Christian world. But the Gospels are also distinctly Tigrayan — intricate paintings of birds and plants reflect the ecology around Garima and depictions of stonework resemble architecture found in nearby Axum, a holy city believed to house the Ark of the Covenant.
Before his veneration, Garima was a reluctant Byzantine king known as Yizhak (Isaac). During the seventh year of his reign, he is said to have encountered a Bible passage that compelled him to leave Rome and seek a monastic life in exile. Villagers say it was a passage from the First Epistle of John (2:17): “And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God lives forever.”
According to his hagiography, the angel Gabriel carried Yizhak over the clouds for four days and nights before placing him on the peak of the mountain in Tigray where the Abba Garima Monastery was later built, a place known locally as “Emba Melaekiti.”
“He was welcomed and honored by the mountains,” Father Gebretsadik told me, describing how the plants and trees rose up to greet him and greenery would spring up in his footsteps. Among his many miracles, Yizhak purged the waters around Adwa of deadly parasites, which made the water holy. He also compelled the wind in the grass to whisper the truth in the face of lies.
It was the miracles he performed that would earn Yizhak his sainthood and the name “Garima,” an ancient Axumite name found in stone inscriptions that date as far back as the 3rd century. Abune Garima then retreated into the monastery to translate the Gospels into Geez. As the day drew to a close, he prayed to stop the sun from setting so he could finish his work. The sun slowed, then ground to a halt, where it remained suspended in the sky until the Garima Gospels were complete. Then the sun continued on its path across the sky before sinking low over the mountains and time flowed freely once again.
For centuries, Garima’s farmers have sprinkled holy water on their crops to promote bountiful harvests. Villagers told me before the war the holy water made their plants grow, protecting them from bouts of hunger that stalk the highlands. The water that flows from a spring near the monastery is believed to offer physical protection from illness and injury.
“But it is not as it was in the past,” a woman called Silas told me. “Abune Garima is unhappy with us.”
Women are not allowed to climb up to the monastery itself, a restriction common to many of the region’s Orthodox monasteries, so my conversations with the monks took place at the foot of the winding stone steps. Father Gebretsadik told me that if I wanted to see the monastery — a colorful cube of a building perched on a rocky outcrop — I should hike up a nearby hill where I would be able to see it from afar.
The countryside around Garima is picturesque, even peaceful. But as my translator and I followed the narrow paths that lace their way up the hillsides, the landscape began to reveal itself as a site of horror. If you look closely, the land is pockmarked with shallow — and now empty — graves.
Not long into our walk, we crossed paths with Amare, a farmer in late middle age sporting a faded blue suit and a warm smile. He and his wife were trapped in Garima for the duration of the war and witnessed the worst of the violence that erupted at the very end. When the guns fell silent, he stumbled across 16 bodies, dumped in a mass grave on the other side of the hill behind his home. They lay unburied, he said, their limbs bent at odd angles.
When I asked him if he knew the victims, he replied simply that he knew them all. In a quiet voice, he began to recite the names of the dead, counting them down on his fingers one by one.
“Some of them were my relatives. Some were very good neighbors. All were good people,” Amare said. “All were civilians, none of them fighters.”
In late 2022, the TDF recaptured large swaths of territory in a series of battlefield victories that sent Eritrean forces into panicked spirals of retaliatory violence. In September, one month before the massacre, Eritrean soldiers raided the Garima Monastery again.
They dragged the monks down the stone steps, stripped them of their robes and interrogated them for hours on end. Father Gebretsadik was detained in a nearby building with seven other monks and two deacons, one of whom was shot and killed. They told me how their captors ran their hands along their bare backs and shoulders, searching for signs that their skin had known the weight of a gun. “It’s a very unusual, disrespectful thing to do to a monk,” said Diego Maria Malara, a social anthropologist from the University of Glasgow who studies Ethiopian Orthodoxy. “A monk is someone you don’t ever touch.”
The survivors were released after prolonged negotiations between the monks and a handful of officers from the Ethiopian National Defense Force (ENDF), who persuaded their Eritrean allies that the monks posed no military threat.
Anxiety over secret soldiers — militants posing as religious figures or civilians — was common during the Tigray war. Suspicions were stoked by Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy himself, who accused Tigray’s “elders and priests” of being involved in an attack on a military outpost in 2020 — the spark that ignited the war. These claims were never substantiated but they fueled popular depictions of Tigrayans that blurred lines between civilians and combatants, which had deadly consequences across the region. Prominent members of the Orthodox Church also used language that dehumanized Tigrayans as a people. Daniel Kibret, a preacher in a right-wing Orthodox religious movement and one of Abiy’s closest political advisors, publicly referred to Tigrayans as “weeds” and “demons.”
That the Eritrean soldiers (likely Orthodox themselves) desecrated the monks in the manner that they did reveals the depth of their skepticism that a Tigrayan could really be a noncombatant. Most of these soldiers would have been forcibly conscripted from a young age, taught that Tigray is solely to blame for Eritrea’s poverty and its pariah status, and forced to serve their country indefinitely — a practice the United Nations has described as “slavery-like.” When they came to Abba Garima, they brought with them all the bitterness that had accumulated over the two decades since the last war was fought in the region.
Read it all in New Lines Magazine