Every Easter, several hundred thousand to well over a million members of the Zion Christian Church, the largest African Initiated Church in Southern Africa, travel to Moria, the church's headquarters near Polokwane in South Africa's Limpopo Province, for a multi day gathering of preaching, prayer and communal worship led by the church's presiding bishop. The scale of the annual Easter gathering makes it one of the largest regular religious assemblies on the African continent, drawing pilgrims from across South Africa and neighboring countries including Botswana, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Eswatini, reflecting the church's reach across Southern Africa well beyond its South African origins.
The Zion Christian Church was founded by Engenas Barnabas Lekganyane, who established the church in 1924 after separating from an earlier Zionist congregation, and who built its headquarters at Thabakgone, his home village near Polokwane, a site that grew into the city now known as Moria. From an initial base of roughly twenty congregations across the northern Transvaal, the Witwatersrand and neighboring Rhodesia, the church grew under Lekganyane and his successors into a denomination with well over a million members, making it, by most counts, the single largest Christian denomination indigenous to Southern Africa rather than descended from an external missionary body.
Moria functions as a genuinely sacred site for the church rather than merely an administrative headquarters, and the Easter pilgrimage there anchors the church's ritual calendar in a way comparable to how other traditions in this atlas center devotional life on a single holy city their founder established.