9 churches carved into rock around the world
From Ethiopia to Helsinki: churches cut down into the ground, hollowed out of cliffs and dug into granite, with what each one is and one detail worth knowing.
The MySavior teamUpdated · 10 min read
And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build My church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.
Matthew 16:18 · BSB
The most famous churches carved into rock are the eleven churches of Lalibela in Ethiopia, cut down into the stone some eight hundred years ago, the painted cave churches of Göreme in Cappadocia, and the rock churches of Matera in southern Italy. Others are hidden in cliffs in Tigray, Armenia, Georgia and Bulgaria, under a wine town in France, and inside a granite hill in Helsinki.
A carved church is built backwards. Nobody lays a stone. The builders begin with a hill or a cliff and take away everything that is not the church, and a mistake cannot be put back. That asks for a particular kind of faith: years of patient work toward something you can only see in your mind, one strike at a time.
Here are nine of them, with what each one is, when it was cut, and one detail worth knowing. Ostrog, the white monastery set into a cliff in Montenegro, is in our list of beautiful places to pray.
Several of these are still working churches and monasteries, so services come first, and opening hours and access rules change. Northern Ethiopia has seen conflict in recent years: check your government’s travel advice before planning a trip to Lalibela or Tigray.
A second Jerusalem cut into the ground
The rock-hewn churches of Lalibela
Lalibela, EthiopiaChurch of Saint GeorgeIn the highlands of northern Ethiopia, eleven churches were cut out of the living rock, most of them in the reign of King Gebre Meskel Lalibela, who ruled from about 1181 to 1221. Tradition says he set out to build a second Jerusalem, and a deep trench between two groups of churches stands for the River Jordan.
The best known is the Church of Saint George, Bete Giyorgis. It is shaped like a cross and was carved downward from the surface, so you see it first from above, its roof level with the ground around it. Lalibela was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1978, but it is not a museum. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church still worships here, and pilgrims fill the churches for Genna, the Ethiopian Christmas, and for Timkat, the feast of Christ’s baptism.
A church you have to climb to
Abuna Yemata Guh
Tigray, EthiopiaAbuna Yemata GuhAt 2,580 meters, about 200 meters above the land below, this small church is hollowed out of a sandstone pinnacle in the Gheralta area of Tigray. There is no road and no stair. Visitors climb the rock face on hand- and footholds, then cross a natural stone bridge with a sheer drop of roughly 250 meters on either side.
It is named for Abuna Yemata, one of the Nine Saints, monks who, tradition says, came to Ethiopia from across the Roman world in the late fifth and early sixth centuries. Local legend dates the church to the sixth century; scholars date its paintings to the late fifteenth. It is still a working church.
A valley of painted chapels
The cave churches of Göreme
Göreme, Cappadocia, TurkeyKaranlık Kilise, the Dark ChurchIn Cappadocia, wind and water have worn soft volcanic rock into cones and cliffs, and for centuries monks and villagers simply dug into them. Around Göreme alone there are some 400 rock churches, and the valley and the rock sites around it have been on the UNESCO list since 1985.
The Dark Church, in the Göreme Open Air Museum, dates from the late eleventh or early twelfth century. Its name comes from how little light gets in, through one small window in the narthex, and that darkness is usually given as the reason its colors are still so vivid. Look up and the whole Gospel is there on the stone: the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Baptism, the Last Supper, the Crucifixion, the women at the empty tomb.
The quarry you were cut from
Isaiah 51:1
“Listen to Me, you who pursue righteousness, you who seek the LORD: Look to the rock from which you were cut, and to the quarry from which you were hewn.
Isaiah 51:1 · BSB
Isaiah wrote to exiles who felt small and finished. He sends them back to their beginning: the next verse names Abraham and Sarah, one couple called by God, from whom a whole people came.
Stand in Lalibela or Göreme and the picture turns literal. Every church on this list is made of the hill it stands in. So are we, in a way. Faith is not assembled out of nothing; it is carved, slowly, from what God has already given, and he is the one holding the chisel.
A cave town in southern Italy
The rock churches of Matera
Matera, Basilicata, ItalySanta Maria de IdrisMatera’s old town, the Sassi, is a hillside of houses and churches dug into soft stone. In the 1950s the Italian government moved most of its people out of the caves into newer parts of the city. Since 1993 the Sassi and the park of rock churches around them have been a UNESCO site, and filmmakers keep coming back: Pasolini shot The Gospel According to St. Matthew here in 1964, and Mel Gibson filmed The Passion of the Christ here forty years later.
Santa Maria de Idris sits on the crag of Monterrone, with a masonry front added to the rock. A narrow passage leads from it into the older crypt of San Giovanni in Monterrone, whose walls carry frescoes painted between the twelfth and the seventeenth centuries.
Churches cut into a mountain
Geghard, the Monastery of the Spear
Upper Azat Valley, ArmeniaGeghard MonasteryGeghard means “spear” in Armenian. Tradition says the Apostle Thaddeus brought to Armenia the spear that pierced Jesus’ side, and the monastery took its name from the relic, now kept in the treasury of Etchmiadzin. Its older name, Ayrivank, means “the Monastery of the Cave”: tradition says it began in the fourth century with Saint Gregory the Illuminator, at a spring inside a cave.
The main church was finished in 1215. Then the builders went into the mountain itself. One church was hollowed out of the rock around 1240, a second in 1283, and a burial hall above them in 1288, a room known for its extraordinary acoustics. The monastery and the valley around it have been a UNESCO site since 2000.
A monastery of many floors
Vardzia, Queen Tamar’s cave monastery
Samtskhe-Javakheti, GeorgiaVardziaOn the left bank of the Kura River in southern Georgia, hundreds of caves climb the face of Erusheti Mountain, in up to nineteen tiers along about half a kilometer of cliff. The first were dug under King Giorgi III, who reigned from 1156 to 1184, and the work went on under his daughter Tamar.
The heart of it is the Church of the Dormition, cut into the rock in the 1180s. On its wall Tamar is painted beside her father, who holds a model of the church: the earliest of her four known portraits. An earthquake in 1283 did heavy damage and took some of the paintings with it, but a few monks still live here.
For the hermits
Hebrews 11:38
The world was not worthy of them. They wandered in deserts and mountains, and hid in caves and holes in the ground.
Hebrews 11:38 · BSB
Hebrews 11 is a roll call of faith, and near its end the writer stops naming names. He remembers the ones who were hunted and mistreated, who lived in caves and holes in the ground, and he gives them the highest praise in the chapter: the world was not worthy of them.
Many of the churches here began just that way, with one hermit in a hollow in a cliff, praying. Others came to join him, and a church grew up around the prayer.
Hermits above a river gorge
The rock-hewn churches of Ivanovo
Rusenski Lom, BulgariaRock-hewn Churches of IvanovoAbout 20 kilometers south of Ruse, the limestone cliffs above the Rusenski Lom river are pocked with cells and chapels, some 32 meters above the water. Hermits settled here in the 1220s around a monk named Joachim, who later became Patriarch of Bulgaria, and monks lived in the caves until the seventeenth century. At its height the community had about 40 churches and some 300 other rooms.
Most of them are lost now. Five churches still hold frescoes from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and the site has been on the UNESCO World Heritage List since 1979.
A church under a wine town
The monolithic church of Saint-Émilion
Saint-Émilion, Gironde, FranceMonolithic Church of Saint-ÉmilionSaint-Émilion is known for its wine, but the town takes its name from a hermit. Émilion was a Breton monk who came to live in a cave here and died in 767, and his followers kept praying where he had prayed.
Around the early twelfth century, a church was dug straight into the hillside: nearly 15,000 cubic meters of rock taken out, six bays, a nave 11 meters high, pillars left in the stone to carry the weight above. It is often called the largest underground church in Europe. From the square you see little more than its carved portal, with the bell tower rising from the rock above. The whole town, church included, has been a UNESCO site since 1999.
A modern church inside the bedrock
Temppeliaukio Church, Helsinki
Helsinki, FinlandTemppeliaukio ChurchNot every rock church is ancient. In 1961 two brothers, the architects Timo and Tuomo Suomalainen, won a competition with a plan they called “Stone Church,” and it was consecrated in September 1969. Its main hall is dug into the granite of a hill in the Töölö district of Helsinki, under a copper-lined dome ringed by about 180 windows.
The walls were left as rough rock, partly because a conductor and an acoustics engineer pointed out how well they carried sound. Today it is a Lutheran parish church and a much-loved concert venue. Sit in a pew on a quiet weekday and you are inside a hill, in full daylight.
A rock to carry with you
Psalm 62:6
He alone is my rock and my salvation; He is my fortress; I will not be shaken.
Psalm 62:6 (BSB)
David wrote this psalm with enemies pressing in, and he says it twice in a few lines: God alone is his rock. The churches on this list have lasted for centuries because they are part of the mountain. That is the steadiness he means.
Most of us will never climb to Abuna Yemata Guh. But a verse can sit where your eyes already go many times a day. MySavior’s wallpaper maker lets you write this verse, or your own words, over a photograph for your Lock Screen, like the phone below, and a Bible verse widget on your Home Screen changes by itself on the schedule you choose.
Sunday, November 8
9:41
He alone is my rock and my salvation; He is my fortress; I will not be shaken.
Psalm 62:6 · BSBTurn this verse into your Lock Screen wallpaperWrite it over a photograph in MySavior’s wallpaper maker and save it to Photos at the size of your iPhone’s screen.
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A small practice for this week
Pick one church on this list and spend a few minutes with a photograph of its inside. Every arch and pillar you see was once solid rock, and someone took away, one strike at a time, everything that was not a church. Then ask God what he is carving away in you this year, and pray Isaiah 51:1 slowly, once a day for seven days. Do not expect to be finished by Sunday. Tradition says Lalibela took twenty-four years.
Carry a word that lasts
Bible verse and prayer widgets you design yourself, a countdown to the feasts of the year, and a saint for every day.
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Questions
What is a rock-hewn church?
A rock-hewn, or rock-cut, church is carved out of solid rock instead of being built from stones. Some are cut down into the ground and stand alone in a trench, like the Church of Saint George in Lalibela, which is called monolithic because it is one single piece of rock. Others are hollowed into a cliff or a hillside, like the cave churches of Cappadocia, Matera and Geghard.
Where are the most famous churches carved into rock?
The best known are the eleven rock-hewn churches of Lalibela in Ethiopia, the cave churches of Göreme in Cappadocia, Turkey, and the rock churches of Matera in Italy. Geghard in Armenia, Ivanovo in Bulgaria and the town of Saint-Émilion in France, with its monolithic church, are UNESCO World Heritage Sites too.
Why did Christians carve churches into rock?
For several reasons at once. Soft volcanic stone, as in Cappadocia, was easy to dig into. Hermits looked for caves for silence and prayer, as Saint Émilion did, and communities grew up around them. And a church cut from the mountain itself is a strong picture of a faith meant to last: “on this rock I will build My church” (Matthew 16:18, BSB).
What is the largest underground church in Europe?
The monolithic church of Saint-Émilion, near Bordeaux in France, is usually described as the largest underground church in Europe. It was dug into the hillside around the early twelfth century, and its nave is about 11 meters high.
Which Bible translation is quoted here?
Every verse in this article is quoted from the Berean Standard Bible (BSB).
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