Archetypal ents? Tree-dwelling hermits in the church forests of Ethiopia

Nearly all of Ethiopia’s original trees have disappeared, but small
pockets of old-growth forest still surround Ethiopia’s churches,
living arks of biodiversity amongst the brown grazing fields. In this
film and essay, Jeremy Seifert and Fred Bahnson travel to Ethiopia to
gain a deeper understanding of how our fate is tied with the fate of
trees.

THE SEEN AND THE UNSEEN
IN THE FORESTS of northern Ethiopia, there are said to dwell large
numbers of invisible hermits who intercede on behalf of all humanity.
Menagn, they are called in Amharic. According to Ethiopian Orthodox
cosmology, hermits rank just below angels in importance, making theirs
the most efficacious of all human prayers. To have one of these holy
men living and praying in your forest is considered a special
blessing, even if you never see him.

About the hermits’ lives, little is known. They appear rarely, and
only then to those with the eyes of faith, yet their presence in these
forests is undisputed. They might accept an offering of dried
chickpeas or a handful of roasted barley left in a clearing, but
mostly they subsist on leaves, bitter roots, and prayer. They wear
shabby clothes, unkempt beards, dreadlocks. Only the holiest of them
achieve a state of invisibility. When someone manages to see them and
attempts to take their picture, it is said, their image will not
appear in the photograph. A hermit might live in a particular forest
for years, going about his hidden work of intercession, and then one
day someone walks by a juniper tree and discovers a pile of his bones.

I live in a temperate rainforest in western North Carolina. I visit
the woods often, sometimes with my wife and sons, sometimes alone;
whenever I enter a forest, I can’t help but fall into reverie.
Increasingly the woods for me have become a place to ponder, to pray
and contemplate, so much so that the woods have come to be inseparable
from my spiritual life. Several years ago when I first read about
Ethiopia’s church forests, it seemed that I’d stumbled on my own
symbiotic relationship, albeit one that had already been thriving for
sixteen hundred years. I made plans to visit, bringing with me many
questions about the geography of faith, but also about different ways
of knowing that often seem in conflict and which our age seems unable
to resolve: our desire for certainty and our hunger for mystery.

My search led me to a man who embodied that tension, and who has
dedicated his life to studying and preserving Ethiopia’s last primary
forests. This is a story about trees and hermits, but it is also the
story of this man, of his love for both.


Photo by Fred Bahnson

THE HINTERLANDS
ON A HOT morning in late February, Dr. Alemayehu Wassie crossed a
dusty field toward a forest surrounded by a stone wall.

As he approached the wall, dozens of worshippers emerged through a
gate. They were clad in white shawls, returning home from a wedding,
and on their necks they wore small wooden crosses. Some of the women
wore crosses tattooed on their foreheads. They left the forest slowly,
in silence.

Alemayehu motioned me toward the wall so that I could see the forest
beyond. This was a quick stop. Soon a busload of fifty local priests
from across the South Gondar province would arrive for the start of a
two-day tour, but first Alemayehu wanted me to see Zhara, the place
where it all began. Alemayehu had convened the gathering along with
his friend and colleague Dr. Margaret “Meg” Lowman, an American
ecologist and canopy biologist, with whom he had worked for the past
ten years to conserve Ethiopia’s church forests. Each year they taught
a workshop for priests of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedu Church,
which traces its roots back to the fifth century. Normally they hosted
the workshops indoors, showing PowerPoint slides and Google Earth
images of the church forests. But this year the two ecologists had
rented a bus. They wanted to show the priests the newly completed
conservation wall at a place called Zajor, in hopes of inspiring them
to protect their own church forests, but first we stopped here at
Zhara, the first church forest to be conserved.

When he decided to become a forest ecologist, Alemayehu realized that
in order to study Ethiopia’s native forests, he would have to study
the forests surrounding churches. Until roughly a hundred years ago,
Ethiopia’s northern highlands were one continuous forest, but over
time that forest has been continually bisected, eaten up by
agriculture and the pressures of a growing population. Now the entire
region has become a dry hinterland taken over almost entirely by farm
fields. From the air it looks similar to Haiti. Less than three
percent of primary forest remains. And nearly all of that three
percent, Alemayehu discovered, was only found in forests protected by
the church.

“I was amazed to discover that,” he said.


Photo by Jeremy Seifert

The pressures on these forests, especially from cattle grazing, were
easily identified; the question of why they persisted was a puzzle. To
solve this puzzle Alemayehu went to Europe to complete first a
master’s degree then a doctorate in forest ecology, returning to
Ethiopia each year for his field research. Alemayehu chose
twenty-eight forests on which to focus his research, sites
representing all of the known endemic tree species, and the more he
studied them, the more he understood their significance. “I was
hooked,” he said. “Church forests became not only my profession, but
my emotional and spiritual connection.” But he also saw how quickly
the forests were disappearing, some from deforestation, most from
cattle grazing. When Alemayehu met Meg at an ecological conference,
she introduced him to Google Earth. They estimated that there were
nearly twenty thousand tiny church forests in the Ethiopian highlands,
scattered like emerald pearls across the brown sea of farm fields, and
most of these were no more than eight or ten hectares. While viewing
the Google Earth images, Alemayehu and Meg hatched a plan: they would
use these images to educate priests, showing them how much forest had
been lost, and also how much was still worth saving.

With the permission of the local priest, he and Meg chose Zhara as
their pilot project. Zhara was rich in biodiversity. During his
initial research Alemayehu counted over forty-six tree species in this
one forest alone. Yet it was becoming degraded. “When I first came to
Zhara in 2002,” he said, “the forest floor was trampled. Like the dirt
floor of a house.” He found no regeneration, no young seedlings
emerging. Cattle had trampled or eaten everything within browsing
height. A harsh microclimate dominated. Trees on the outer perimeter
bordering farm fields were stressed; when Alemayehu returned a year
later, some of those border trees had died.

“I said to myself, ‘this forest is not going to last.’”

As part of the pilot project, Alemayehu and Meg offered their first
workshop to the priests on how better to conserve their forests, and
it was at this workshop that the idea for the wall first arose. It
came from the priests themselves. They would enlist local villagers to
take stones out of the surrounding farm fields and build a dry-stack
stone wall around the forest. Meg raised money for a gate and for
trucking the stones. They built the first wall at Zhara in 2010,
expanding the forest boundary from eight to ten hectares. Very quickly
the process of regeneration began. The inner forest became more
secure, the air more conditioned. Birds returned. Wild animals
increased. The number of pollinators grew.

The conservation wall was working, but this was only one forest. What
of the twenty thousand other church forests in the Ethiopian
highlands? As they narrowed down a list of conservation priorities,
they quickly faced a definitional challenge. What represents a forest?
Is it five trees? Five hundred trees? Could it be a degraded site, or
does the forest have to be beautiful to justify conserving it? In the
end they chose forty forests, those that contained the highest
biodiversity and could serve as a genetic seedbank along the elevation
gradient.

If they could save these forty forests, then perhaps one day, they
hoped, the native forests of the Ethiopian highlands could be
restored.

THE JOURNEY
UP AHEAD ON the forest path, a dozen or so men approached, surrounding
an elderly man dressed in a yellow robe. Alemayehu walked over, bowed
low, and kissed the man’s wooden cross. By the way people attended the
elder, followed him, watched his every move, it was clear he possessed
some kind of authority. I wanted to ask Alemayehu who this man was,
but just then a horn sounded out on the road. The bus full of priests
had arrived.

We rejoined Meg, who was waiting back at the Land Rover, and set off
for our main destination, the bus lumbering behind us. Earlier that
morning we had left the city of Bahir Dar, a city on the southern end
of Lake Tana, and now we were on the road to Zajor. We traveled for
the next hour on increasingly deteriorating roads, until finally we
left roads altogether, jouncing over dusty farm fields bisected by dry
riverbeds. There were eight of us packed together in the Land Rover:
Alemayehu and the driver up front, my friend and filmmaker Jeremy
Seifert, Dr. Meg Lowman, and myself in the back, and hunched in the
very back, Tegistu the translator and several priests we’d picked up
along the way. Even as the road deteriorated, a jocular mood
prevailed. A full day of adventure awaited us.

We were bound for a special place, Alemayehu explained: the church
forest of Zajor. According to local tradition, when the Ark of the
Covenant was brought to Ethiopia some three thousand years ago by King
Solomon’s son Menelik I, it rested for a time at Zajor. The place has
long been known for its hospitality. Of the dozens if not hundreds of
church forests Alemayehu has visited and surveyed in his work as a
forest ecologist, Zajor was his favorite.

As we bounced over fields and navigated the steep ravines, I decided
to ask the question I’d been holding ever since I first learned of the
church forests and their conservation walls. Back home in the US, I
said, there was much talk of walls just then. Trump was whipping his
followers into high dudgeon with frothy “build the wall” rhetoric, and
a lot of us were scared he might actually follow through with his
intended xenophobic construction project. I then asked Alemayehu the
question that had troubled me since I first read about the
conservation walls: why erect barriers? Did the world really need more
walls?

“I like walls,” Alemayehu said. He chuckled.

A small-framed man of quiet demeanor, he suddenly grew expansive,
throwing open his arms in mock welcome, and shouted out the window of
the Land Rover, “Mr. Trump, I want you to build your walls here! These
Americans don’t understand you, but I understand you, Mr. Trump! When
you say you want to build a wall, I believe you! We can work together.
Just take a fraction of that money you want to spend on your border
and give it to Ethiopia—in two years we can provide you with more
walls than you ever dreamed!”

We all laughed. Nothing like a shared tyrant joke to foster
international cooperation.

“Ah,” Alemayehu said, “here we are.”


Photo by Jeremy Seifert


Photo by Jeremy Seifert

Like many church forests, Zajor was set on a hill. Before climbing to
the forest edge, we had to first navigate one final ravine. As the
Land Rover slowed to begin its descent, a group of boys ran up beside
us, laughing and making traffic cop signals. We dipped into the dry
riverbed and climbed the steep bank beyond, then someone gave a shout.
Behind us, the bus was inching down into the ravine, its nose pitched
at a dangerously steep angle. For a moment it hovered over the ravine,
perched on three wheels. Then it leveled out and pulled up the far
embankment. Everyone cheered. We parked in a large field below the
hill and disembarked. The priests emerged from the bus, their flowing
white robes radiant against the dry brown fields, and together we
walked en masse up toward the forest of Zajor.

It was beautiful, even from a distance. From every point in the
landscape, the eye would be drawn exactly here, its gaze traveling
over the surrounding brown fields with no rest, until it arrived on
this sudden lushness bursting with every shade and hue of green.
Surrounding the forest was a handsome new stone wall, contouring
around the hill in both directions toward the horizon. It was an
inviting place, a place where had you been walking for hours across
this dry, hot landscape, as many people did before arriving here, you
would be instantly drawn to this place of coolness and rest. “City on
the Hill” was an ancient scriptural metaphor for the place where God’s
people gather, but here, I thought, was an improvement on that old
trope, one more fitted for the Anthropocene age, less militant
fortress than mystical refuge: the Forest on the Hill.

I followed Alemayehu up through the dry fields. When we reached the
outer wall he paused, waiting for the men in flowing white robes to
join us. We were met at the gate by several priests in white tunics, a
welcome party. Leading them was a gray-haired priest holding an
ornately carved staff. “I love this guy,” Alemayehu said, as he walked
over to greet him. “It’s such a pleasure for me to come here.”

THE OUTER WALL
WHEN ALL THE priests had gathered beside the wall, Alemayehu paused
for effect, then began his pitch.

This land was once completely forested, he began—sweeping his arms
across the surrounding countryside—so much so that nobody would have
seen the church. It was all trees. Now almost all the old forests have
been cut down. The only place where they are still protected are in
church forests like this one. When the people here at Zajor decided to
build their wall, he said, they were not bureaucratic, they just built
a wall. He motioned to the elderly priest with the carved wooden staff
and thanked him for initiating the project. Alemayehu hoped other
priests would be inspired by this community’s example.

As we stood beside the wall, a stream of local parishioners came and
went through the gate. This is what Alemayehu meant when he described
the wall as “porous.” A group of children hopped on the wall and ran
down its length to the west until they rounded the corner and were
lost to sight. An elderly woman approached. She stopped beside the
wall, crossed herself three times, then bowed low at the waist and
began to fan her face with both hands, cupping the air and pulling it
toward her, as if partaking of some invisible goodness that lay inside
the wall. Then she rose and walked solemnly up the forest path.
Clearly this was no mere border fence; it was an entrance into the
sanctuary.


Photo by Jeremy Seifert


Photo by Jeremy Seifert

Perhaps I was witnessing more than gestures of devotion, important as
they were. Maybe they were also the secret to conserving the forest,
small acts that together with hundreds of other gestures like them
formed an invisible shield around the forests of Zajor. As I would
come to learn, this shield was embedded deep within the structures of
belief that had survived here since the fourth century. Our Western
conceptions of belief are almost entirely inward and private. Here,
and at other points on my journey into these forests, I was witnessing
the performance of a mystical geography, the soul’s journey to God
made visible in the landscape.

Churches in the Ethiopian Orthodox tradition inherited many of their
ideas of sacred space from Judaism. The center of their church, like
the metaphorical center of the Jewish temple, is called the qidduse
qiddusan, the Holy of Holies. In that center rests the tabot, a
replica of the biblical Ark of the Covenant, another borrowed symbol.
Only priests can enter the Holy of Holies. Enclosing this sacred
center is a larger circle—the meqdes, where people receive
communion—and outside that lies a still larger circle called the qine
mehelet, the chanting place. All three spheres are contained under the
round church roof, but those circles ripple outside the church itself.

Beyond the church building lies the inner wall, which forms a circular
courtyard around every church. According to tradition, the proper
distance this wall should stand from the church is the armspan of
forty angels. During my visits to different churches, I watched many
people enter these inner courtyards. Before crossing the threshold,
they performed various gestures of piety—crossing themselves three
times, dipping a knee, perhaps kissing the wooden doorframe. It was
clear to everyone that when you crossed the inner wall, you were
entering holy ground.

The brilliant move the priests made was to take the idea of the inner
wall and replicate it. Using the same design, they built a second wall
of dry-stacked stone just outside the forest boundary, thereby
extending the invisible web of sanctity to include the entire forest.
Suddenly the holy ground surrounding the church expanded from the size
of a backyard to a vast tract of ten, fifty, or even several hundred
hectares. Once Zajor’s outer wall was complete, people could no longer
cut trees along the perimeter, nor could cattle trample or browse
young seedlings. Every tree, animal, and hermit was now sheltered
under the church’s protection.

“In our tradition, the church is like an ark. A shelter for every kind
of creature and plant.”
By extending the boundaries of what they consider sacred, the Orthodox
Christians of northern Ethiopia are not only protecting their own
forests; they are offering a pattern for how we might tap into our
deep cultural memory reaching back hundreds if not thousands of years,
and put that memory to work on behalf of the web of life.

When it can be channeled, there is no force on earth more powerful
than the religious imagination.

As I stood outside the forest wall at Zajor, this stone barrier before
me seemed a near-perfect solution. Labor was plentiful, so there were
ample people to help build the walls. Stones of volcanic basalt were
freely available in the surrounding farm fields, and local farmers
were happy to have them removed. In a place called Wonchet, another
church forest I visited, the priest described the process: Fifteen
volunteers from four surrounding villages came each day, rotating in
and out. They averaged fifty linear feet of wall per day. Working
straight through, it took them two months to complete. Meg raises
money to pay for gates, for trucking costs to carry stones to the
building site, and for stone masons who direct the work. The
conservation walls do many things—serving as a habitat for rodents,
lizards, snakes, and insects, for example—but most importantly they
address the devastating effects of cattle grazing. With the wall in
place, cattle are excluded, while people can come and go. “The wall is
porous,” Alemayehu explained, pointing to the people entering the
forest. “Humans can come here any hour of the day to contemplate or
pray or collect seeds.”

Contemplate. Pray. Collect. Ecclesial verbs transformed into forest
verbs.

I had other questions for Alemayehu, questions about the distance a
forest’s sanctity extended. And what of the surrounding farm fields,
were they not considered sacred? I understood the need to keep out
cattle, but wasn’t the wall a sign of retreat? With twenty thousand
church forests, how could they possibly protect all of them? And what
of the hermits he spoke of, and their invisible work of intercession?

But these questions would have to wait. There beside Zajor’s wall, I
stood before a series of concentric circles radiating outward, as
though the tabot were a stone tossed onto the landscape, sending
invisible ripples of holiness out into the world. Here was the
culmination of sixteen hundred years of religious imagination, and I
was about to walk into its center.

See it all here:

Source:
<https://emergencemagazine.org/feature/the-church-forests-of-ethiopia/>

or

https://t.co/VUwhg65Cmu
-- 
Stephen Hayes, Author of The Year of the Dragon
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