The Story of Saint Teklehaimanot

1. Before He Was Born

In a village called Zorare, high in the green mountains of Shewa, there lived a priest named Tsega Za’ab and his wife, Egzi’ Harya. Their names are beautiful ones. Tsega Za’ab means “Grace of the Father,” and Egzi’ Harya means “God has chosen her.”

Their family had been priests for a very long time. Old Ethiopian books trace their family line all the way back to Zadok, the priest who served King Solomon in Jerusalem — the same priests who, the tradition says, travelled to Ethiopia with Menelik I long, long ago.

Tsega Za’ab and Egzi’ Harya loved God. They gave food to hungry people. On the twelfth day of every month they kept the feast of Saint Michael the Archangel. But there was one sadness in their house that would not go away: they had no children. Year after year they prayed for a child, and year after year, no child came.

The raid from Damot

Then something frightening happened. Across the Jamma River lay the kingdom of Damot, and its king, Motalami, did not worship God. His soldiers rode into Shewa and carried people away — and one of the people they carried away was Egzi’ Harya.

Imagine how afraid she must have been, taken far from her home and her husband. But she did the bravest thing a person can do when they are frightened. She prayed.

The rescue

And heaven answered her. Saint Michael the Archangel came in shining light, lifted her up, and brought her safely back to her husband. In one version of the story, Motalami threw a spear after them — and the spear turned around in the air and never reached them.

Soon afterwards, an angel appeared to both of them in the night. “God has heard you,” the angel said. “You will have a son. And he will bring a whole nation to Christ.”

2. His Birth

The baby was born on the twenty-fourth day of Tahsas — around the year 1215. His parents named him Fisseha Tsion, which means “Joy of Zion.”

And straight away, wonderful things began to happen.

When he was only three days old, the tradition says, the baby opened his mouth and praised God out loud. Three days old! Most babies that age can only cry.

Later, when he was about a year and a half, a famine came to the land. There was no food anywhere, and the great feast of Saint Michael was coming. His mother had nothing to cook with. The little boy reached out and touched the empty storage jars — and flour, oil, butter and honey filled them right up to the brim, so that his mother could keep the feast and feed the poor.

He would receive his famous name later, when he became a monk: Tekle Haymanot, which means “the Plant of Faith.” Ethiopian teachers explain it beautifully — a plant of the Father, a plant of the Son, and a plant of the Holy Spirit.

3. Growing Up

He grew up in his father’s house, and his father was his first teacher. He learned to read the Scriptures in Ge’ez, the ancient language of the Ethiopian Church. He learned the Psalms of David. He learned the prayers and the fasts.

But here is the part that surprises most children: he was also a hunter. He was strong and fast, and he knew the hills around Zorare better than anyone. He would run out with his spear and hunt among the rocks and the tall grass.

God had not wasted a single one of those skills. The boy who could walk for days over rough mountains would grow into the man who walked from Shewa to Tigray and back — and the hunter would soon be told to hunt something entirely different.

4. Deacon, Then Priest

When he was fifteen years old, his father took him to Bishop Kirillos (Cyril), the Egyptian bishop who served in Ethiopia in those days. The bishop laid his hands on the boy’s head and ordained him a deacon.

Some years later, the same bishop ordained him a priest, and he served the churches of Shewa. He stayed and cared for his mother and father until they both died, as a good son does.

The day everything changed

Then came the day that turned his whole life around.

He was out hunting when the valley suddenly filled with light, and Saint Michael stood in front of him. The angel said words that people still repeat eight hundred years later:

He went home, gave away everything he owned to the poor, and set out to preach. He never came back for any of it.

5. Walking Across Ethiopia

What happened next is why Ethiopians call him the “New Apostle.” He walked, and walked, and walked.

The tree at Katata

In a place called Katata, the people did not worship God. They bowed down to an enormous old tree, because they believed a demon lived inside it and would hurt them if they did not.

Tekle Haymanot walked straight up to that tree, lifted his hand cross, and prayed. The demon fled. The tree tore itself out of the ground. And the people — who had been afraid of it their whole lives — came in their thousands to be baptised.

Into Damot, to King Motalami

Then he did something extraordinarily brave. He walked into Damot — the kingdom of the very king whose soldiers had once carried off his mother — and stood in front of King Motalami and preached to him.

The king was furious. Tekle Haymanot was beaten and thrown into a deep pit. But God kept him safe, and he would not stop preaching.

Then the king’s son fell terribly ill. Tekle Haymanot prayed over the boy, and the boy stood up completely healed. Motalami dropped to his knees. The king who had once raided Shewa was baptised — and his people with him.

North to Lake Hayq

Around the age of thirty he set out northwards. He crossed into Amhara and came to the island monastery of Hayq Estifanos on Lake Hayq, where the great teacher Abba Iyasus Mo’a lived. He stayed there and studied for nine years.

North again, to Tigray

Then further north still — to Tigray, to the ancient holy city of Axum, and up to Debre Damo, one of the oldest monasteries in Ethiopia. Debre Damo sits on the flat top of a cliff, and even today the only way up is to climb a long leather rope. There he learned under Abbot Yohanni for about twelve years, and other monks began to gather around him as students.

He longed, the tradition says, to travel on to Jerusalem, to stand in Gethsemane and at Golgotha where our Lord suffered.

6. Debre Asbo, Which We Call Debre Libanos

At last he came home to Shewa — and in about the year 1284 he founded a monastery in the mountains above a great gorge. He called it Debre Asbo.

You know it by a different name. About 160 years later, Emperor Zara Yaqob renamed it Debre Libanos in the year 1445, and that is the name it still carries today.

Disciples came from every direction to learn from him, and when they had learned, he sent them out to build monasteries of their own — Zena Marqos, his own cousin, who went to Gojjam; Anorewos; Medhanine Egzi’e; Adhani of Damot; and many more. Together these communities became known as the “House of Tekle Haymanot,” and most Ethiopian monasteries trace their family tree back to him.

How he prayed

He lived in a cave above the monastery, and there he prayed in a way that is almost impossible to imagine. He prayed standing up, for year after year after year. He set sharp upright spears and staffs in a ring around himself so that he could not fall asleep. He ate almost nothing at all.

The tradition tells us he stood like this for many years — some accounts say twenty-two, others say thirty-four — until at last one of his legs grew weak and fell away. And then he simply carried on, standing on the one remaining leg, for seven more years of prayer.

His disciples wrapped the leg carefully and buried it beneath the altar, and God worked miracles there.

He lived at Debre Libanos for twenty-nine years. And on the twenty-fourth day of Nehasse, around the year 1313, when he was nearly a hundred years old, he fell asleep in peace.

7. The Six Wings

Now for the part everybody wants to hear — because if you have ever seen a picture of Abune Tekle Haymanot in church, you have seen the wings.

It happened back at Debre Damo, on that cliff with the rope. He was being lowered down the rock face when the rope snapped. In one telling, Satan himself cut it.

He fell. But he did not fall far.

God gave him six shining wings — six, like the seraphim who stand before the throne of God — and he floated gently and safely down to the ground. From that day, the tradition says, he could fly above the clouds all the way to Jerusalem and back.

8. His Other Miracles

The wings are the famous one, but they are far from the only one. There is a whole book of them called the Ta’ammera Tekle Haymanot — “The Miracles of Tekle Haymanot.” Here are some of the things it records:

• He raised the dead. There is an entire chapter about it in the Debre Libanos book.
• He healed the sick and drove out demons — including the demon that left the prince of Damot in the shape of a monkey.
• He commanded nature. He multiplied food, made springs of water flow out of dry rock, and travelled on a holy cloud.
• He was protected in danger — surviving a pit, and a thrown spear whose thrower found his own arm frozen.
• His relics work miracles. About fifty-seven years after his death, his body was brought to Debre Libanos. The Church remembers that day on Ginbot 12.

9. The Saint and the Kings

Here is a part of the story where we have to be careful and honest — because it is a place where the traditional story and the historians do not agree, and it is good for you to know that such places exist.

The story as it is told

In the year 1270, the throne of Ethiopia changed hands. The Zagwe kings, who had ruled from Lasta, gave way to Yekuno Amlak, a prince from Shewa who claimed descent from King Solomon. Historians call this the Solomonic Restoration.

The traditional Ethiopian books tell it like this. A cock crowed a strange prophecy — “whoever eats my head shall be king” — and Tekle Haymanot understood what it meant. When young Yekuno Amlak ate the head, the saint knew God had chosen him. God told the saint to stop praying for the last Zagwe king, and to anoint Yekuno Amlak instead.

And so, the story says, the crown passed peacefully, with no war — and the grateful new emperor gave the Church one third of all the land of the kingdom, and made the abbot of Debre Libanos the Echege, the head of all Ethiopian monks, second in the Church only to the Abun himself. There is a mosaic at Debre Libanos today showing the saint crowning the king.

10. How We Know, and How He Is Honoured Today

The books

Almost everything we know comes from a kind of book called a gadl — a “spiritual struggle,” which is the Ethiopian word for a saint’s life story. The Gadla Tekle Haymanot exists in several versions:

• The Waldebba version, the shorter one, from the early 1400s.
• The Debre Libanos version, the fullest and most famous, from the early 1500s, later expanded by Echege Yohannes Kema.
• The Senkessar (Synaxarium), the Church’s book of saints, which remembers him on Nehasse 24 and Tahsas 24.

An English scholar named E. A. Wallis Budge translated the Debre Libanos version into English in 1906. Notice, though, that all of these books were written a hundred years or more after the saint died. That is why historians read them carefully — and why the Church reads them with love.

How to recognise him in an icon

Next time you are in church, look for:

• Six golden wings spread around him;
• He is standing on one leg, with the other leg shown separately, often wrapped in cloth;
• A hand cross, a book, and a mekwamia prayer staff;
• Sometimes a small water bowl, for how little he ate and drank.

His feast days

He is honoured by the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, the Eritrean Orthodox Church, and the Coptic Orthodox Church of Egypt, where he is called Saint Takla Haymanot the Ethiopian and has a great church in Alexandria. Churches carry his name all over the world, wherever Ethiopians have settled.

And at Debre Libanos the pilgrims still come, climbing the mountain path and drinking from his holy spring, exactly as they have for seven hundred years.

11. Where This Story Comes From

Good stories deserve good sources. If you or your teacher want to read further, start here.

Ethiopian sources

1. Gadla Tekle Haymanot (The Life of Tekle Haymanot) — the Debre Libanos version, the Waldebba version attributed to Abba Samuel of Waldebba, and the expanded version of Echege Yohannes Kema.
2. Ta’ammera Tekle Haymanot (The Miracles of Tekle Haymanot), compiled by Abba Peter.
3. The Ethiopian Synaxarium (Senkessar), entries for Nehasse 24 and Tahsas 24.
4. Be’ela Nagastat (The Wealth of Kings) — the source of the Yekuno Amlak account.

Translations

5. Budge, E. A. Wallis. The Life of Takla Hâymânôt in the Version of Dabra Lîbânôs, and the Miracles of Takla Hâymânôt… and the Book of the Riches of Kings. 2 vols. London, 1906. (Translated from British Museum MS Oriental 723.)
6. Budge, E. A. Wallis. The Book of the Saints of the Ethiopian Church. Vol. IV. Cambridge, 1928.

Historians

7. Taddesse Tamrat. Church and State in Ethiopia, 1270–1527. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972.
8. Kaplan, Steven. The Monastic Holy Man and the Christianization of Early Solomonic Ethiopia. Wiesbaden, 1984.
9. Kaplan, Steven. “Hagiographies and the History of Medieval Ethiopia.” History in Africa 8 (1981).
10. Huntingford, G. W. B. “‘The Wealth of Kings’ and the End of the Zāguē Dynasty.” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 28 (1965): 1–23.
11. Uhlig, Siegbert et al., eds. Encyclopaedia Aethiopica. 5 vols. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2003–2014 — see the entry “Täklä Haymanot.”
12. Campbell, Ian. The Massacre of Debre Libanos. Addis Ababa University Press, 2014.