Lake Tana monastery legends

At a Glance

Central figures: The monks and hermits who founded the island monasteries of Lake Tana - among them Abuna Samuel, Abuna Betre Maryam, and the unnamed guardians who carried sacred manuscripts and tabots to safety across the water.
Setting: Lake Tana in the northwestern Ethiopian highlands, the source of the Blue Nile, where more than thirty islands hold monasteries dating from the 13th and 14th centuries onward.
The turn: During periods of invasion and upheaval, the monks carried Ethiopia’s most sacred objects - royal crowns, illuminated manuscripts, and tabots - across the lake to the islands, where no army could easily follow.
The outcome: The islands preserved what the mainland could not. Manuscripts survived centuries of war. The bones of emperors rested undisturbed. The tabots remained consecrated and whole.
The legacy: The island monasteries of Lake Tana endure as active houses of worship and as repositories of Ethiopia’s oldest surviving religious art, manuscripts, and royal relics, guarded by monastic communities that have never broken their watch.

The lake has no business being where it is. It sits in the highlands at nearly six thousand feet, broad and flat as a sea, fed by rivers that come down from the Simien range and the Gojjam plateau. Fishermen in reed boats - tankwa, they call them, bound papyrus that rides low in the water - cross it in the early mornings when the surface is still. On clear days you can see the islands from shore: dark masses of forest rising out of the water, the tops of old junipers and wild olives breaking the line of the sky. From a distance they look uninhabited. They are not.

There are monks on those islands. There have been monks on those islands for seven hundred years, and perhaps longer. The monasteries they built are round, following the old Ethiopian church plan - the outer ambulatory, the inner qiddist or holy place, and at the center the meqdes, the sanctuary where the tabot rests, wrapped in cloth, seen by no one but the priest who serves it. The walls are painted. The ceilings are painted. Angels with enormous eyes stare down from the rafters. The colors have not faded.

The Crossing of the Sacred Things

The chronicles do not record exactly when the first monk poled a tankwa out to one of the islands and decided to stay. But the pattern is clear from what followed. When the Muslim armies of Ahmad ibn Ibrahim - the Ethiopians called him Gragn, the Left-Handed - swept through the highlands in the 1530s, burning churches and scattering the court, the monks of the mainland carried what they could to the water. Manuscripts went into leather satchels and were ferried across on the reed boats. Tabots were wrapped in their altar cloths and held above the waterline by priests who stood waist-deep during the crossing. Crowns and ceremonial robes belonging to the emperors went into wooden chests. If a boat swamped, the monks dove for what it carried.

The islands received everything. Gragn’s cavalry could not ride across water. His soldiers did not know how to build boats, or if they did, they did not attempt it - some accounts say the monks prayed and the winds came up and the lake would not be still. Whatever the reason, the islands were not touched. The manuscripts of Kebran Gabriel, the paintings of Narga Selassie, the relics at Daga Estifanos - all of it survived because the lake stood between the sacred things and the armies that would have burned them.

The Bones of Emperors on Daga Estifanos

On the island of Daga Estifanos, in a low building behind the round church, there are coffins. They are glass-sided, or were once, and inside them lie the mummified remains of Ethiopian emperors. Yekuno Amlak is said to rest there - the king who overthrew the Zagwe dynasty in 1270 and restored the Solomonic line. Other emperors followed him into the island’s keeping: Dawit I, Zara Yaqob, Fasilides. The monks wrapped the bodies and placed them in the church’s care. No woman has set foot on Daga Estifanos. The prohibition is old and absolute. The monks who guard the dead kings do not explain it. They simply say it has always been so.

The coffins sit in rows. The church itself is painted with scenes from the life of Saint Stephen - Estifanos - and the colors are deep reds and greens and golds, the faces of the saints rendered in the flat, frontal Ethiopian style with their wide, watchful eyes. The monks who maintain the church chant the deggua at the appointed hours. The dead emperors, wrapped in their shrouds, listen.

Kebran Gabriel and the Forbidden Shore

Kebran Gabriel is the island closest to the town of Bahir Dar on the southern shore. It too forbids women. The monastery there holds some of the oldest illuminated manuscripts in the Tana collection - gospel books with painted evangelist portraits, psalters with decorated borders, prayer books in Ge’ez that the monks still read aloud during the qiddase. The pages are goatskin, stained dark with age, the ink still legible.

The monks of Kebran Gabriel live according to a rule that has not changed in substance for centuries. They wake before dawn. They chant. They eat once, sometimes twice. They tend the gardens that grow between the old trees. When a manuscript needs repair, a monk who has trained for years in the craft sits with a needle and thread and resews the binding. No electricity reaches the island. No road connects it. The tankwa comes and goes with supplies, and occasionally with pilgrims who have received permission to visit.

The Painter Monks of Narga Selassie

Not all the islands exclude women. Narga Selassie, on the island of Dek, was built in the 18th century by the Empress Mentewab, consort of Emperor Bakaffa and one of the most powerful women of the Gondarine period. She commissioned the church and its paintings herself. The walls show scenes from the life of Christ, from the miracles of Mary, and from the battles of Saint George - Qeddus Giyorgis - mounted on his white horse, driving the lance through the serpent. Mentewab’s own image appears among the donors painted on the church walls, her face composed, her crown visible.

The painters who worked at Narga Selassie belonged to a tradition that stretched back centuries. They ground their own pigments - red from iron oxide, yellow from orpiment, blue from imported indigo or, in older times, from lapis brought along the trade routes. They mixed the pigment with egg yolk and applied it to the plaster while it was still damp. The faces of the angels were always painted last.

The Watch That Does Not End

The monks are still there. Every morning the deggua rises from the island churches across the flat water of Lake Tana. The manuscripts remain in their storerooms, wrapped in cloth, brought out for feast days and for scholars who come with letters of introduction. The tabots rest in their sanctuaries, unseen. The emperors sleep on Daga Estifanos. The reed boats still cross from shore to island and back, carrying bread, carrying oil, carrying the rare visitor who has come to see what the lake preserved.

The water is what saved it all. Not walls, not armies, not treaties - water. A highland lake wide enough and rough enough that the things carried to its islands stayed safe while the mainland burned and was rebuilt and burned again. The monks understood this. They chose the islands not for solitude alone but because the lake was a kind of fortress that required no stone.