Mother Church of Ethiopian Christianity

Aksum was the seat of one of the great powers of the ancient world, a kingdom that traded across the Red Sea and issued its own coinage, and it became Christian in the fourth century when King Ezana was converted, making the Aksumite realm one of the earliest Christian states. The church of Saint Mary of Zion is remembered as the first church built in the country and is honoured as the mother church of Ethiopian Orthodoxy.

For centuries the emperors of Ethiopia were crowned in its precinct, binding the monarchy to the Zion tradition and to the claim of descent from Solomon. The complex today has three main elements: the older rectangular church rebuilt under the emperor Fasilides in the seventeenth century, on the foundations of far older structures destroyed in earlier wars; the large domed New Church of Saint Mary of Zion built under Emperor Haile Selassie and completed in 1964; and, between them, the guarded Chapel of the Tablet. The site remains a living centre of worship and pilgrimage, busiest at the great Marian festivals when huge crowds of the faithful gather at Aksum.