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Asmara · Eritrea · a church that no longer exists

Enda
Maryam

In the old village at the west of Asmara stood a church built the way the kingdom of Aksum built: courses of thin stone with timber laid through them, and round beam ends studding the wall. It was pulled down in 1919–20. This model is put together from a survey that took less than two hours, and four photographs.

Main room
14 m long
Surveyed
1906
Demolished
1919–20
The old church of Enda Maryam at Asmara photographed in 1909, its earth roof carried on rough timber props

Photographed in 1909 · demolished 1919–20

Enter the reconstruction

A church that no longer exists, rebuilt from a two-hour survey and four photographs.
Inspect the evidence

Photograph: unknown photographer, 1909 · Wikimedia Commons · public domain

I

Why this building matters

The other Aksumite church

Almost nothing survives above ground from the kingdom of Aksum. For churches there is really one building — the monastery church at Debre Damo — and there was a second, here. When the Deutsche Aksum-Expedition reached Asmara in 1906 they recognised it at once: the same timber laid through the stone, the same round beam ends, the same massive doorways. Their surveyor wrote that this was “a contemporary of the monastery church of Debre Damo”.

It had one thing Debre Damo does not. Its nave was carried on round columns — twelve of them, six a side — built up out of bedded fieldstone and plastered smooth. In the whole of the German survey of the north, deliberate round columns turned up nowhere else.

Thirteen years later it was gone: demolished and replaced in 1919–20, and replaced again by the cathedral that stands on the site today. A few carved fragments went to the museum in Asmara. This model is the building put back from what the survey wrote down.

How much of this is real

Four kinds of certainty

The surveyor was honest about his own limits, and the model keeps his division. He had under two hours, and he wrote down exactly which of his drawings were measured by hand and which were not.
01Measured in 1906
Hand-measured by von Lüpke on the day: the plan, the aisle widths, the carved capitals.
02Seen in the photographs
Visible in the 1909 photographs — the roof, the props, the coursing, the doors. Every height comes from here.
03Von Lüpke's reasoning
What he argued had been there and lost, from joints, stubs and doors in the wrong places. Shown as his argument, not as fact.
04Filled in
Needed to make a complete building but not fixed by any evidence.

Before 1906

What had already gone

The church the surveyor saw was not the church that was built. Three things had happened to it, and he could read all three in the fabric.
Von Lüpke’s reasoningThe east end
Three sanctuary rooms once stood at the east, as they still do at Debre Damo. They had vanished without trace. He argued it from a stub of wall at the corner, a straight joint running the full height, and two doors at the head of the aisles where doors never go. The model leaves the gap rather than inventing the rooms.
Seen in 1906A sanctuary in the middle
At some later date a walled chamber was built inside the church, standing in the middle of the nave and swallowing eight of the twelve columns. Its door is pushed off the centre line. Only the four columns at the ends of the rows were still free to see.
Seen in 1906The roof, and the props
The heavy earth roof is far later than the church. After what may have been a collapse, the weight was taken off the failing walls and columns and put onto rough timber props — some outside, most inside. That is why the church in the photographs looks like a shed wrapped round a building.

Two things the model does not do

It does not reproduce the survey drawings. The plan and sections were drawn by Theodor von Lüpke, who died in 1961, and they are still in copyright. Their measurements are facts and are used here; the drawings themselves are not published.

It does not repaint the paintings. The entrance hall was covered in scenes from the Bible, the lives of the saints and the history of the country, and thirteen painted circles ran round the arch, each with an animal in it. Too little was legible to copy, so the model shows the surfaces bare.

The building itself

Four photographs from 1909

Taken three years after the survey and about ten years before the church came down. Every height in the model is read off these.
  1. Sepia photograph of a long low church with a flat earth roof carrying grass, its oversailing eaves held up by a row of thin crooked timber posts, the stone wall behind laid in thin courses with large round beam ends projecting in rows and a timber-framed doorway in the centre
    Photograph · 1909

    The entrance front

    The doorway is framed three times over in timber, and the big round pegs across the wall are the ends of the cross-beams. The thin posts and the earth roof they carry are a late repair, not the original church.

    Unknown photographer, 1909 · public domain · Wikimedia Commons
  2. Sepia photograph of people standing in the shade beneath the oversailing roof of the church, beside a wall of thin stone courses banded with dark timber and studded with round beam ends, with a dry-stone enclosure wall at the left
    Photograph · 1909

    Under the props

    The single most useful photograph. People stand against the wall, which is how every height in the model was worked out, and the stone-and-timber construction is legible at reading distance.

    Unknown photographer, 1909 · public domain · Wikimedia Commons
  3. Dark sepia photograph of the side of the church, showing the flat vegetated roof oversailing on posts, a barred doorway, and rows of round beam ends across the coursed stone wall
    Photograph · 1909

    The long side

    The same building from another side, with a figure at the left for scale. The roof line sags visibly along its length.

    Unknown photographer, 1909 · public domain · Wikimedia Commons
  4. Distant sepia photograph of the church on a low rise above cultivated ground, seen past trees and a dry-stone wall, with its flat roof and ring of posts silhouetted against the sky
    Photograph · 1909

    Where it stood

    The church on its rise above the fields, ringed by its wall. This quarter is now central Asmara.

    Unknown photographer, 1909 · public domain · Wikimedia Commons

All four are out of copyright and are shown uncropped and unretouched, re-encoded only. Four further scans of the same negatives exist on Wikimedia Commons; they are duplicates and are not repeated here.

Measurements

What was actually measured

These are the numbers taken by hand on the day. Everything else in the model — wall heights, thicknesses, the roof — is read off the photographs and is less certain.
Main room
14 m
Long, measured 1906
Nave
4 m
Clear width between the columns
Each aisle
2 m
Clear width
Columns
12
Round, six a side, built of stone and plastered
Entrance hall
3 m
Deep, with a plank arch across it
Column capitals
17 cm
Of timber, on top of the stone

Over time

Built, patched, propped, pulled down

  1. 01
    The church

    Built in the Aksumite manner, and judged by the 1906 surveyors to be a contemporary of Debre Damo. No one has ever dated it.

  2. 02
    Repairs, still ancient

    Corner rooms added at the west, a sanctuary built inside the nave. Both still use the old beam-end construction, so both are themselves very old.

  3. 03
    Propped

    The walls stopped being able to carry the roof. A heavy earth roof went on, and a forest of timber props went in under it.

  4. 04
    Gone

    Demolished and replaced in 1919–20, and replaced again in 1938 by the cathedral on the site today. Some carved pieces survive in the museum in Asmara.

Sources

Where the measurements come from

  1. 01
    von Lüpke 1913

    Theodor von Lüpke, “Die alte Kirche zu Asmara,” in Daniel Krencker, Ältere Denkmäler Nordabessiniens (Deutsche Aksum-Expedition, Band II; Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1913), pp. 195–198, figs. 420–423 and plate XXVI.

    Used for: the only measured plan of the church · aisle widths, main room length, pier count and construction · the vestibule, its carved capitals and painted arch · what had already been lost by 1906
    Open source
  2. 02
    Phillipson 2009

    David W. Phillipson, Ancient Churches of Ethiopia: Fourth–Fourteenth Centuries (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 64–66, figs. 84–85.

    Used for: modern assessment of the church and its place beside Debre Damo
    Open source
  3. 03
    Bent 1893

    J. Theodore Bent, The Sacred City of the Ethiopians (London: Longmans, Green, 1893), pp. 38, 42–43.

    Used for: an earlier visitor's account of the wall paintings
    Open source
  4. 04
    1909 photographs

    Four photographs of the church taken in 1909 by an unknown photographer, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

    Used for: the earth roof and its timber props · wall coursing, monkey-head rhythm and door framing · the compound wall and the setting · every height in the model
    Open source

The church it was compared to

Däbrä Dammo, still standing

Open that reconstruction