Life in the Land: Series–Stories from the Church of the Holy Sepulcher
November 25, 2023
—As a kid I loved climbing the tree that stood on the east side of our home on Evelyn Drive so that I could crawl out on the roof and watch the cars go by, but I sure wouldn’t have wanted to live up there. Yet the Ethiopians actually do live up there and have for a long time. The rooftop of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the traditional site of the death and resurrection of Jesus, is thankfully flat and large enough for living quarters and even a monastery, but I’m sure the Ethiopians would prefer to worship inside the church like they once did. Now they are banished to the roof.
—Here’s the story, and it’s clearly a black eye on the unity of the church. The Ethiopian Orthodox and the Egyptian Coptic churches are two of the six “denominations” that share custody of the church, but these two churches have a particularly long history. In fact from the fourth until the twentieth century the Ethiopian church leaned heavily on the Coptic church, even relying on it to supply a steady stream of bishops for them. Then in 1951 things suddenly changed when the Ethiopians chose their own archbishop. To be sure tension between the two churches had been brewing for the previous four hundred years with each claiming ownership of both the rooftop monastery and the two chapels which are stuffed into the nearby staircase that leads up to the roof. The Copts argue that the Ethiopians wouldn’t even be on the rooftop apart from their kindness, for when the Ethiopians were unable to pay the hefty taxes demanded by the Turkish government in the sixteenth century, the Copts graciously permitted them to remain as guests on the rooftop where the Ethiopians are now entrenched.
—Today due to the massive influx of Ethiopian Jews and tenuous relations with Egypt the Israeli government refuses to enforce any religious or court-ordered mandates regarding the dispute, and a fistfight that broke out in 2002 didn’t solve anything either despite seven Ethiopian and four Egyptian monks being injured in the melee. It looks like an old-fashioned standoff.