Qualla: Tigray Province

Tigray Province: Introduction

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1958, a famine swept across Tigray province. Emperor Haile Selassie had the money to send food aid. He did not send it. More than 100,000 Tigrayans died. A generation later, during the 1983-1985 Ethiopian famine, Mengistu Haile Mariam's Derg regime used food supply restrictions as counter-insurgency policy against Tigray and Wollo. Around 1.2 million people died across Ethiopia, with the majority of deaths concentrated in the north - in Tigray and the neighboring highlands. Then in November 2020, federal Ethiopian forces and Eritrean allies launched a war against the Tigray People's Liberation Front that would last nearly two years, kill several hundred thousand people by the most credible estimates, and devastate one of the oldest civilizational heartlands in Africa. Tigray has paid a terrible price for being both strategically important and politically resistant.

Read more: Tigray Province on Qualla

Tigray Province: The Spiritual Core

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The spiritual center of Tigray is Aksum. From the 1st through the 7th centuries CE, the Kingdom of Aksum was a trading superpower that coined its own money, raised enormous stone stelae over royal graves, and extended its reach to southern Arabia. When King Ezana converted to Chr...

Read more: Tigray Province on Qualla

Tigray Province: Rock Churches in the Cliffs

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Eastern Tigray holds one of the greatest concentrations of rock-hewn churches in the world. Monasteries like Debre Damo, built on a flat-topped mountain reached only by climbing a leather rope up a cliff, date to the 6th century and remain active. The Gheralta cluster, the Tembie...

Read more: Tigray Province on Qualla

Tigray Province: Unity Made Late

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Although outsiders talk about Tigray as a unified place, local history tells a more complicated story. Before the 19th century, Tigray was a patchwork of provinces with their own dynasties, customs, and occasional wars: Shire, Adyabo, Haramat, Hawzen, Geralta, Tembien, Agame, End...

Read more: Tigray Province on Qualla

Tigray Province: Adwa and Maychew

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1896, at the Battle of Adwa in northern Tigray, an Ethiopian army under Emperor Menelik II defeated an invading Italian force - the most significant African military victory over a European colonial power of the 19th century. Adwa became a symbol of African independence, cited...

Read more: Tigray Province on Qualla

Tigray Province: The 2020-2022 War

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The war that began on November 4, 2020 is one of the gravest tragedies of 21st-century Africa. Federal Ethiopian forces under Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, allied with Eritrean troops under Isaias Afwerki and Amhara militia, invaded Tigray after a political rupture with the TPLF. Fo...

Read more: Tigray Province on Qualla

Tigray Province: What Endures

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Tigray's people are Tigrayans first, descendants of the Aksumites who built the stone stelae, the Christians whose monasteries have endured for fifteen hundred years, the farmers whose terraces hold steep slopes against the rains, the mothers who have buried children in famines t...

Read more: Tigray Province on Qualla