Abba Garima manuscript legends

At a Glance

• Central figures: Abba Garima, a monk from Constantinople who crossed the sea and the desert to reach the Ethiopian highlands; and the Nine Saints, the group of missionaries who came with him to strengthen the Ethiopian church.
• Setting: The Ethiopian highlands near Adwa, in the kingdom of Aksum, during the reign of King Gabra Masqal in the late fifth and early sixth centuries CE.
• The turn: Abba Garima arrived at a cliff-top site where he would build his monastery, and - needing to complete the Gospels before he could consecrate the church - he wrote and illuminated the manuscripts in a single day, the sun halting in the sky until the work was finished.
• The outcome: The Garima Gospels were completed, the monastery was consecrated with the finished scriptures inside, and the manuscripts survived for more than fifteen hundred years as the oldest known illuminated Christian gospels in existence.
• The legacy: The Abba Garima monastery still stands near Adwa, and the two volumes of the Garima Gospels remain there, kept in the church’s treasury, consulted by the monks, and shown to no outsider except by the abbot’s word.

He came from Constantinople. His name before he took his monastic name is not remembered, or if it is, it is remembered only in Ge’ez liturgical texts that few outside the Ethiopian church have read. What the tradition holds is this: he was one of nine, the Tis’atu Qiddusan - the Nine Saints - who left the Roman world and traveled south across Egypt, across the desert, across the Red Sea coast, and up into the highlands of Aksum to preach and to found monasteries where the gospel had already taken root a century before but needed deepening.

Abba Garima went to the hills near Adwa. He chose a site partway up a cliff, a place that was difficult to reach and therefore suitable for prayer.

The Nine Saints and the Journey South

The Nine Saints are remembered by name in Ethiopian tradition: Abba Garima, Abba Pantalewon, Abba Aregawi, Abba Aftse, Abba Guba, Abba Alef, Abba Yem’ata, Abba Liqanos, and Abba Sehma. Some traditions say they came from Rome, some from Syria, some from Constantinople. The discrepancies do not trouble the Ethiopian chronicles, which hold that all nine were sent by the same will and arrived in the same generation.

They scattered across the highlands. Abba Aregawi went to Debre Damo and climbed the cliff there - the chronicles say a serpent lowered its body to pull him up. Abba Yem’ata went to a rock pillar so high and narrow that the church he built there can only be reached by climbing the sheer face. Each of the nine found a place that tested the body and therefore suited the soul.

Abba Garima’s site was not as dramatic as Debre Damo, but it was remote enough. The path wound along a ridge and then cut upward through scrub and loose stone. He cleared a space, and the people of the surrounding country came to help him build. The walls rose from the local stone. The monastery took shape.

But a church without scripture is an empty room.

The Day the Sun Stood Still

Abba Garima needed the Gospels. Not a borrowed copy, not a text held in another monastery’s treasury, but a set of illuminated scriptures that would belong to this house and consecrate it. He sat down to write.

The tradition does not describe where he obtained the vellum, or the pigments, or the ink. It says he began writing at dawn. The Ge’ez text flowed from his reed pen - the Gospel of Matthew first, then Mark, then Luke, then John. He wrote in two volumes. The first contained the four Gospels with canon tables - those columned pages at the front that show which passages in one Gospel correspond to passages in another. The second contained the Gospels again in a different arrangement, with illuminated portraits of the evangelists and with decorative borders in colors that fifteen centuries later would still be vivid: deep blue, rust red, gold, and a green that no one has been able to match with local pigments.

He painted the portrait of Christ enthroned. He painted the evangelists with their symbols. He painted architectural arches framing the canon tables, columns with carved capitals, birds perched on the arches. All of it in a single sitting.

The sun reached its highest point. Abba Garima kept writing. The sun did not move. The afternoon did not come. The light held at its peak, steady and unflickering, as if the sky itself had been told to wait.

The monks who later told the story said God commanded the sun to halt so that Abba Garima could finish the work before nightfall. It is the same miracle given to Joshua at Gibeon - the sun standing still in the heavens for the sake of a task that could not be interrupted. The Ethiopian chronicles record it without elaboration. The sun stopped. The monk wrote. When the last page was finished - the colophon, the final flourish - the sun resumed its course, and evening came.

The Manuscripts in the Treasury

The two volumes were placed in the monastery’s meqdes, its inner sanctuary. There they have remained. Fifteen hundred years is a long time for vellum to survive, and the Ethiopian highlands are not gentle - there is rain, there is heat, there are termites and war and the slow patience of decay. Yet the Garima Gospels endured.

In 1896 the Italians came to Adwa and were defeated by the armies of Menelik II. The monastery was not far from the fighting. The manuscripts survived. In 1936 the Italians came again. The manuscripts survived. Fire touched the monastery more than once over the centuries. The manuscripts survived.

When scholars from outside Ethiopia finally examined the Garima Gospels in the early twenty-first century and subjected them to radiocarbon dating, the results placed the vellum between the fourth and seventh centuries CE - consistent with Abba Garima’s lifetime in the late fifth or early sixth century. The illuminations showed stylistic links to late Roman and Coptic Egyptian painting, which was also consistent. The portraits of the evangelists used a technique that had vanished from European manuscript production by the seventh century.

The monks were not surprised. They had always known what they had.

The Guardian and the Locked Room

Today the Garima Gospels are held in a stone treasury within the monastery compound. They are wrapped in cloth. The abbot decides who may see them. A single monk - the guardian of the manuscripts - is responsible for their care. He does not leave the compound.

The arrangement is familiar to anyone who knows Ethiopian tradition. It is the same logic that governs the Ark of the Covenant at the Church of Mary of Zion in Aksum: a sacred object, a single guardian, a closed room. The Ark has its monk. The Garima Gospels have theirs. The guardian’s life is organized around the object, and the object stays where it was placed.

Visitors to the monastery see the church, the ridge, the view across the Adwa hills. They do not see the manuscripts unless the abbot permits it. When the pages are opened, the colors are still there - the blue, the red, the gold, the green that should have faded centuries ago. The portrait of Christ looks out from vellum that was prepared while the Roman Empire still held its western provinces.

The sun moved on after Abba Garima finished writing. The ink dried. The pages were bound. Everything else in the world from that afternoon has turned to dust, but the Gospels are still in their room on the ridge above Adwa, and the guardian is still watching.