Gondar  ( The Camelot of Africa )

They say “ you have only to stroll through the banqueting halls and gaze down from the balconies of the many castles and palaces here to imagine the intrigue and pageantry that took place back in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when Gondar, then the Ethiopian capital, was home to a number of emperors and warlords, courtiers and kings ”.

Gondar rose to prominence after Ethiopia went through a long period without a fixed capital and emerged in the seventeenth century as the largest settle­ment in the country. It was an important administrative, commercial, religious, and cultural centre and was noted for the skill of its many craftsmen.

The oldest and the most impressive of Gondar’s imperial structures is the two­ storeyed palace of Emperor Fasilidas, which is built of roughly hewn brown basalt stones held together with mortar.

Other buildings in the ‘imperial quarter’ of Gondar include the library of Fasihdas’s son Emperor Yohannes I (1667—1682); a nearby chancellery; the saddle-shaped cas­tle of Yohanness son, Emperor lyasu I (1682-1706); the large hall or ‘house of song’ of Emperor Dawit III (1716-1721), in which many ceremonies took place in former days; the long V-shaped reception and banqueting hall of Emperor Bakaffa (1722-1730); and the two-storeyed palace of the latter’s redoubtable consort, Empress Mentewab. The palace compound is also the site of the grave of one the most re­markable nineteenth-century foreign trav­ellers to Ethiopia: Emperor Tewodros’s close friend Walter Plowden.

Several notable Gondarine structures are to be seen outside the town. The most impressive, located in the Kaha River valley south of Gondar, is a well-preserved ‘bathing palace’ variously attributed to Fasilidas or lyasu I. It stands in a rectangular, neatly walled depression, which is filled with water once a year for the Timkat (Epiphany) celebrations, and, though popularly referred to as a ‘bathing palace’, was in fact probably constructed for such celebrations. Not far away stand the ruins of a small pavilion said to have been the mausoleum of a horse named Zobel belonging to Fasilidas, lyasu, or some other Gondarine monarch of former times.

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