❝AT ELEVEN DEGREES NORTH LATITUDE, We left Bahar Dar early to head to two islets in the middle of the lake: Narga and Dagger, with the communities previously notified and the monks on the threshold. There were times when the outboard motor jumped fast and loud and sprayed foam over the side in our faces. Loose freighters and tankwa slow, typical lake canoes made from papyrus reedsThey fished indifferently in our wake. We landed around 9:30, in the sun and heat. As in most of the monasteries on the lake, its perimeter and islands, these are also off-limits to women today.
The Daga Islet, with its small, well-kept pier, leads you to the Monastery of St. Stephen.
The monks who welcomed us, after they had finished lunch and we had just arrived, warned us without explanation that the church could not be visited. I told the guide to ask them if they had any memory of the British Consul Cheesman, who visited the site in 1933 after the fire that had been struck by lightning and wrote about it at length, after the new temple was built, a simpler one with a rectangular floor plan that would later replace the original circular one. In reality, he was thinking about the graves of some of the Ethiopian royal figures which have been located in this monastery since the 17th century.
But he made it clear to me that they didn't know him, although I dare to suspect that he didn't tell them that, nor did he have anything else in mind other than the idea of going to eat, whatever it was, he and the boatman. So we went straight into the small museum, a small cabin, also well-equipped bookstore with its large mashaf codices, LLAMADA IrkbetThat I ended up finding myself there, in the museum instead of in the church as I had imagined, The coffins containing the remains of five key figures in Ethiopian history, including Emperor Fasilades, surprised me. We had arrived during a leisurely hour, it seemed clear, and the visit was fleeting. I was equally unable to get him to show me any of the codices, because of their illustrations, not their size.
While the guide spent the last moment of the visit praying in private, and I lost sight of him, I snooped around and ended up here: a small workroom, with its shelves and electric loom, its finished products and spools arranged by color and size. Although the monk didn't speak English—or perhaps he was more of a novice—he let me take photos with a flash, because it was a blind room, with no windows, and the door only slightly ajar. Very expressive, he smiled as he stared at me and tapped the palm of his hand on the seat of a low stool nearby for me to sit on.
The funny thing is that There is no electricity grid on the island (it is not the only islet within the enormous Lake Tana where this happens) and some portable solar panels are used, conveniently distributed, with which he can knit and the rest of the community can live a relatively comfortable life.
He was the youngest monk I saw; the rest were older and hand-knitted (I quickly noticed they didn't want photos...). Some of them lived with open wounds and deformed feet like the characteristic heels that are stuck in the doorways of monasteries (without an instep or footprint because they've been barefoot since childhood and the ground is as hard as flint). One of them, with unexpected confidence—perhaps encouraged by the sight of the lump of wood I was wearing on the thumb of my right hand to protect the wound from the blow I'd taken when disembarking a few days earlier and was disinfecting with pure eggshells with the lemons they'd given us as a picnic dressing—untied the leaf poultice held by the very roots of the jacaranda tree that he was displaying at the level of his Achilles tendon to show me the degree of resignation he'd fallen into, driven by the limited antiseptic properties of the precious tree. I suggested we exchange our remedies, lemon for jacaranda I mean, and divert my attention to a scene so unpleasant to behold.
Another very friendly guy started talking to me in Italian about his time in Rome during the reign of Paul VI, according to what he himself told me. Soon the guide appeared and we were taken out. injera (a type of bread characteristic of the country), mitmita (typical assortment of spices) and laid down by the (a type of fermented drink made for certain holidays, not long ago Christmas was celebrated according to their calendar). After embracing each other very fraternally with the Ethiopian shoulder bump first and then a full Western hug, two of them accompanied us to the pier to say goodbye and take us what was left over for the journey, which we nibbled on the boat. After two well-filled hours we were in Bahar Dar, on the terrace of the Kuriftu●
