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.
I first 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.
On another hill, about half a mile from Amare’s, are two stone houses. One is brown with a tin roof and the other a brilliant turquoise. Here, we met members of the Gebre family — Mengesh and his wife Abrihet, their brother Zeru and his wife Silas. On Oct. 27, 2022, five of their sons and grandsons were executed in the Garima massacre.
Seated on a circle of stones overlooking the valley, Mengesh recounted their losses. It was early in the morning of that date, a month after the raid on the monastery and days before the peace agreement was signed, that Eritreans stationed at Garima received word of a TDF ambush that killed dozens of their men.
At around 6 a.m., the soldiers stormed the homes where the Gebre family’s sons lived with their wives and children. The soldier accused Mengesh’s eldest son, Tewele, of sharing information with the TDF — information Mengesh says his family had no means of knowing. When Tewele refused to confess, they moved to the next house. When no one confessed, they dragged five men out of their homes and marched them into the valley directly below their homes.
“Then we heard gunshots,” Mengesh said, gesturing toward the valley and the thread of a dried-up river. The men were shot point-blank.
For a moment, Mangesh paused in his retelling, then collapsed into a deep sob. His family gathered close, placing steadying hands on his shaking shoulders.
Abrihet explained that, during the occupations, villagers were forced to help the Eritrean soldiers by performing labor around their encampments and sharing whatever resources they had. Such was the intimacy of the occupation that people were able to recount in detail the meals they shared with the soldiers who would eventually murder their loved ones.
“They knew us all by name,” she told me.
Wiping tears from his eyes, pale blue with cataracts, Mengesh continued.
For three days, the Gebres’ sons and grandsons — Tewele, Woldegeorges, Hawaria, Teklit and Gebrewahid — lay where they had fallen. Their killers guarded their corpses, refusing to let them bury their dead. For the next three days, villagers told me they heard frequent gunfire and the sounds of screaming echoing through the hills. By the time the massacre was over, more than 100 bodies were scattered across Garima. All were civilian noncombatants, according to witnesses, survivors and Garima’s monks.
The monks had been cloistered away in the monastery while the killings happened, reciting psalms and praying to their God to protect the community from harm. Gunshots were so common during that time that they assumed they were hearing sounds from a nearby battle.
Monks seek out lives of quiet contemplation, but the noise of war often made it difficult to pray. It was not unusual, in those days, for the silence to be shattered by the crack of gunfire or the roar of a jet engine. “One day during the occupation was like 100 days,” Father Gebretsadik recalled.
The monks did not learn about the massacre until it was over, when one young man dared to climb up to the monastery to share the news.
“We believed the power of Abune Garima was protecting us,” Father Gebrehiwot said. “Later, we learned our community had been massacred.”
The monks followed the messenger out into the surrounding hills in a procession. Father Gebretsadik walked out front, brandishing a large cross. Heavily armed Eritrean soldiers were stationed all along the road. They told the monks that the victims were secretly militants who did not deserve proper burials.
“We told [the soldiers] no, they were civilians,” said Father Gebretsadik. “[A soldier] asked me if I could take responsibility for my words and I agreed. So after some time, he allowed us to bury them.”
Forcing bodies to remain unburied was common practice during the Tigray war. Orthodox burial rites must be performed as quickly as possible to ease the soul’s journey onward from the physical world toward an eternal heaven. These rites also comfort the living, providing structure and meaning to counter the disarray of grief.
Depriving a body of a proper burial is “violent on so many levels,” explained Meron Gebreananye, a Tigrayan scholar who holds a Ph.D. in religion and theology from the University of Durham. “On the one hand it is traumatic seeing your loved one’s bodies out in the open. But you are also losing a sense of healing that might have come from a ritual burial.”
Death rites are known collectively as “fit’hat,” a word that translates to the English verb “release.” In ordinary circumstances, fit’hat begins at the burial and continues through seven more stages, concluding after 80 days.
There is no concept of purgatory in Ethiopian Orthodoxy and, among the scholars, monks and villagers I spoke to, there was no singular understanding of what may have happened to the souls of the dead during this period of enforced limbo. There was no straightforward explanation beyond a sense that something had gone profoundly wrong. Long conversations with survivors left me with the sense that the souls of their loved ones were understood as trapped or stalled somehow on their journey between worlds.
“These burial rites are designed to ensure that the soul’s transition is as smooth as possible,” said professor Ralph Lee, an Orthodox theologian at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. “[The disruption] wouldn’t stop the soul from going to heaven, but it would have interfered with it going well.”
All surviving members of the Gebre family still live on the hill overlooking the valley where their sons and grandsons were killed and left unburied. Their bodies would have been in the direct line of sight of their parents, grandparents and siblings. These images continue to haunt them.
“I cannot forget the sight,” Silas told me. “It is like the tragedy happened now, not some time ago.”
Other survivors told me that images of their murdered relatives were seared into their minds, accompanying symptoms which, in Western psychology, might be understood as post-traumatic — nightmares, flashbacks and intrusive thoughts. Diagnoses of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) may be worlds away from Garima, but I was struck by some of the similarities between psychological descriptions of how trauma shapes grief and the purposes of fit’hat, as they were explained to me by monks and scholars.
During the three days they were left unburied, Garima’s dead quite literally became intrusive images — previously unthinkable acts of violence replayed in a seemingly endless loop. For psychologists, intrusive images and flashbacks associated with PTSD or complex grief are believed to occur when processes of memory “consolidation” (whereby shorter-term memories “settle” and become longer-term ones) are disrupted.
Healthy trauma responses emerge not through forgetting what happened but rather when a traumatic experience is integrated into memory, making it something that happened in the past rather than something that is still ongoing. Fit’hat, too, helps the bereaved let go of the dead to keep them close in spirit, living on in the afterlife and in memory. In their own ways, both transform one’s relationship to an unbearable loss through letting something go.
“We do not expect fit’hi,” Mengesh told me in the days leading up to the second anniversary of the massacre, using another word that shares a root with fit’hat. Fit’hi means justice in the narrow legal sense of the term but also implies fairness or accountability. Gebrekirstos Gebremeskel, a Tigrinya language expert, explained to me that this shared root is also found in words that signify processes of questioning and answering for, untangling a knot or loosening one’s grip. Justice, too, is a form of letting go that makes other things possible.
Garima’s wartime dead have now been laid to rest in the hallowed earth of the churchyard. But grieving families told me they continue to feel unmoored from their saint. The sense of spiritual abandonment that began when the war started and the Garima Gospels disappeared, which was deepened in the wake of the massacre, persists in the uncertain aftermath of the peace deal.
The timing of the massacre was particularly disturbing for Garima’s monks and villagers — the killings happened on St. Garima’s “feast day,” a holy day in the liturgical calendar when worshippers make ritual offerings to a specific saint in the hopes that their prayers will be answered.
“Before my sons were killed, I went to the church every day to beg Abune Garima for the war to end,” Silas said. Each day, she would make the dangerous journey down the hill, past the Eritrean soldiers to the monastery grounds, where she would join a procession circling the bright round church, where she would chant and pray. “After they died it was like he completely abandoned us, completely betrayed us,” she said.
The Garima Gospels are not merely artifacts valued for their age and beauty: For many in the Garima community, these ancient manuscripts are seen as “relics” of St. Garima himself. Relics are physical objects (sometimes a piece of a saint’s bone interred in a church) that link the earthbound world with the transcendent power of God. “If the Gospels and our other treasures are gone it means we are gone,” Father Gebrehiwot told me.
Removed from context, a relic loses something fundamental to its being — the way it mediates relationships between people and their saint. “A manuscript is something that is alive,” Maria Malara explained. “It is not a dead piece of text, it is a living thing.”
In the wake of such unprecedented violence, these relationships take on even greater importance. Ethiopian Orthodox saints are liminal beings, capable of crossing otherwise rigid theological boundaries between the world of the living and the world beyond. They can act as messengers, protectors and disciplinarians. When the faithful fall on hard times, they believe their saint is either testing them or punishing them. Often, it is impossible to know which it is, and the absent Gospels certainly have not helped survivors come to terms with the past few years.
“Maybe when the Gospels return home, Abune Garima will return to us,” a young woman who lost her husband in the massacre wondered. “For now, all we can do is pray.”
But the Garima Gospels will only return to the monastery when the monks believe the peace will last. For now, at least, spiritual insecurity is amplified by physical insecurity. When I returned to Garima in October, violent crime was rising. Young men, some of them armed ex-TDF fighters, have turned to banditry to sustain themselves through the region’s economic crisis. In every city I visited, there were whispers of another war. The return of the Garima Gospels and the monastery’s other ancient treasures requires a more durable peace — a prospect that seems increasingly remote.
Still, the monks have hope. Over the past few months, they have begun visiting the Gospels in hiding — something they were too afraid to do back in January, when they believed they were being watched. “We know now that the Gospels are safe,” Father Gebretsadik told me in October, a weary smile breaking through his salt-and-pepper beard.
The Gospels’ hiding place is a closely guarded secret. Father Gebretsadik is one of only a few monks who know their whereabouts, and no one was going to divulge their location to a foreigner like me. My translator warned me that my journalistic curiosity could easily be misread, as there is a long history of Westerners stealing Ethiopia’s ancient treasures and placing them in climate-controlled museums thousands of miles away.
Orthodox scholars and Tigrayan civilians who spent time near other holy sites during the war wondered if the Garima Gospels might be hidden in networks of caves that snake through the Adwa mountains. For centuries, Garima’s holy men have ventured deep into the mountains for periods of contemplation, fasting and isolated prayer. Tigray’s caves tend to be dry, cool and exceedingly dangerous to navigate for those without knowledge of where they lead. Some wondered if the Gospels could have been sealed and buried underground or entrusted to someone in an unlikely location. No one knows for sure and no one, aside from these monks, likely ever will.
Trauma can make an experience feel exceptional to history. During war, the power of religion might lie in part in its ability to de-exceptionalize — to build a sense of continuity and community around losses that can seem so singular and isolating, so utterly devoid of meaning. But the unprecedented horrors of the war and ongoing crises across the country have led many to question the Orthodox Church, which is also grappling with a political schism in its political leadership.
Several young Tigrayans in Mekelle and Addis Ababa told me they were moving away from the Orthodox Church altogether. Even before the war, some were lured away from Orthodoxy by the glitz and wealth promised by the “prosperity gospel,” an increasingly powerful evangelical movement in Ethiopia. Others told me they were struggling to make sense of the war’s brutality through any religious framework and were searching for answers elsewhere.
At Garima, however, few have given up on their saint. I asked the Gebre family if they still go to the church to pray to St. Garima, given all they have lost. “Of course,” Abrihet replied. “What choice do we have?”
When I returned to Garima in October, just days away from the two-year anniversary of the killings, the monks led me around the back of the church where they reinterred most of the 113 victims. For a while, we stood in silence among the graves, the air alive with birdsong and the rush of wind through the trees. Each mound of red earth was topped with stones but otherwise unmarked.
Days later, on the second anniversary, the Gebre family and dozens of other survivors gathered nearby and waited for their sons’ names to be read out in the liturgy. They lit candles and brought offerings, a way of coaxing St. Garima back to them.
The Garima Gospels were penned at a moment when time stood still — the sun held high in the sky by a less weary God. More than 1,500 years later, the Garima community is learning to live with myriad absences — of the Gospels, their saint and their loved ones. In October, the monks told me that survivors are now “nearsighted,” unable to see more than a few feet in front of them, their visions of the future obscured by restless ghosts.
While they wait for some semblance of normalcy to return to the highlands, life in Garima goes on. Each morning, the Gebre family wakes with the sun and tends to their crops and their dwindling herd of cows and goats. Amare works in his garden, waiting for rain to come. Across Tigray, there has been little by way of healing: no justice, no release, no clear path forward. For now, the treasures of Abba Garima, including the Garima Gospels, may remain forever displaced, destined to lie somewhere in the Adwa mountains, littered with shallow graves.
Reporting for this article was supported by the Pulitzer Center.
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