“Ethiopia 🇪🇹 ~Fasilides Portuguese Castles in Gondar”
Day 3: (Jan 8) Ethiopia 🇪🇹 20-Dat Cultural Tour
After breakfast, enjoy visiting the oldest and the most impressive Gonderine structure; the Royal Enclosure, with six castles and several other buildings; including the Royal Bath…
The city’s physical and architectural centrepiece is Fasil Ghebbi, a stone-walled Royal Compound containing half a dozen fairytale castles, including the three-storey original built by Emperor Fasil in the 1630s
The history of Gondar City begins In 1636, when Emperor Fasilides ended the tradition by decreeing Gondar the Ethiopia’s capital and started building a walled-enclosure around his castle. It became the palace compound for half a dozen different palace residences, three churches and support buildings.
Most famous are the Gondar castles of Ethiopia, that are located in this large walled compound. These were the residences of Ethiopia’s government from the seventeenth to the first half of the nineteenth centuries; now being part of the Gondar UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The long battlemented wall of the palaces compound include turrets, 12 gates and three bridges which protected the different castles, palaces and churches for the changing royalties over time. Today one finds within the premises of this curtain wall: Fasilides Castle – or Enqulal Gemb (Egg Castle, for its egg-shaped domed roofs on the towers)-, Iyasu’s Castle, Dawit’s Hall, Bekaffa’s Banqueting Hall, stables, a sauna, Mentewab’s Castle, the Library and Chancellery of Yohannes I, as well as the Asasame Qeddus Mikael Church, Elfin Giyorgis church and Gemjabet Mariyam Church.
Depending on the building, the architectural designs reflect Arabian, Indian, and Baroque influences in addition to Ethiopian Axumite and Lake Tana styles and architectural traditions. With their curtain walls, huge castles with looming battlemented walls and towers, Fasil Ghebbi and Kuskuam seems like a piece of medieval Europe transplanted into Ethiopia.
By decree of Emperor Yohannes I, the people of Gondar were segregated by religion and status into different neighborhoods, which can still be recognized today; the Muslims had to live in Addis Alem; the Ethiopian Jewish people in Kayla Meda; in Abun Bet lived the clerics of the Ethiopian Church and in Qagn Bet, the nobility. In 1887, Abdallahi ibn Muhammad and the next year Sudanese invaders viciously attacked Gondar, setting fire to all the city’s churches but one; Debre Berhan Selassie Church.
During the occupation by Italy from 1936 – 1943, the Italians used the Royal Enclosure; Fasil Ghebbi, as their headquarters, while developing some parts of the city for officials and colonists, which can still be recognized by the Italian design of their buildings. During the liberation by the British, several castles were bombed and severely damaged.
After its decline in the 19th century, the city of Gondar continued to be a commercial and transport hub for northwest Ethiopia. With a population of more than 200,000 inhabitants, Gondar is growing rapidly due to fast urbanization, like all other cities in Ethiopia. The majority of the inhabitants of Gondar are Ethiopian Orthodox Christians, 2% Muslims and 1.5% Protestants. The Ethiopian Jews have been airlifted to Israel in the early 1990s. The city is home to the University of Gondar, which includes Ethiopia’s principle faculty of medicine.
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Hello and Welcome to our Travel Blog Website, We enjoy writing about our experiences and taking photos of our adventuring along the way. Our names are: Daryl and Pen, but Daryl calls me “Bunny.” We met, quite randomly, whilst both… Read More