Qualla: Tigray Region

Tigray Region: Introduction

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit A.Savin, FAL. The obelisks of Aksum still stand where workers raised them seventeen centuries ago, granite fingers pointing at a sky that has watched empires rise and fall. One of them, shipped to Rome by Mussolini in 1937 and returned to Ethiopia in 2005 — and re-erected in 2008 — came home to a region that was about to remember, with terrible clarity, what war means. Tigray occupies the northernmost stretch of Ethiopia, roughly 53,000 square kilometers bordered by Eritrea and Sudan. The Tigrinya-speaking highlanders who farm its terraces have called this place home for three millennia. And between 2020 and 2022, roughly 600,000 of them died in a war that most of the world barely watched.

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Image: A.Savin | FAL

Tigray Region: The Cradle Story

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit A.Savin, FAL. Ethiopians often call Tigray the cradle of their civilization, and the archaeology backs them up. Near the modern town of Yeha stand the ruins of a great temple complex built when the kingdom of D'mt flourished three thousand years ago, its people already irrigating fields, worki...

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Image: A.Savin | FAL

Tigray Region: Rock and Ink

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jan Nyssen, CC BY-SA 4.0. The landscape itself preserves memory. In the Gheralta mountains, churches carved into sandstone cliffs can only be reached by climbing rock faces with bare hands. Monks there still keep Ge'ez manuscripts written in ochre and charcoal ink, painted with egg tempera, some of them a...

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Image: Jan Nyssen | CC BY-SA 4.0

Tigray Region: Emperors and Rebels

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit A.Savin, FAL. Tigray's emperors and its rebels have shaped Ethiopian history out of all proportion to the region's size. Emperor Yohannes IV, crowned in 1872, ruled a united Ethiopia from this northern highland until his death at the Battle of Metemma in 1889. In 1943, Tigrayan peasants rose a...

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Image: A.Savin | FAL

Tigray Region: The War

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jan Nyssen, CC BY-SA 4.0. In November 2020, federal forces and Eritrean troops crossed into Tigray. What followed was catastrophic. An estimated 600,000 people died, according to independent researchers, making it one of the deadliest wars of the twenty-first century. Famine returned to the region as food...

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Image: Jan Nyssen | CC BY-SA 4.0

Tigray Region: What Still Stands

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit A.Savin, FAL. The surviving monasteries at Debre Damo can still only be reached by climbing a leather rope up a sheer cliff, and the monks still haul supplies the same way. In the southeastern Tembien, farmers terrace the slopes in dry-stone walls they call gedeba, a practice so old that nobod...

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Image: A.Savin | FAL