Piazza & Churchill Avenue

The occupation lasted five years. In that time, the Italians built roads, constructed public buildings, laid out boulevards and piazzas, and tried to impose a European urban order on a city that had its own logic. They also committed terrible atrocities: the massacre of February nineteen thirty-seven, following a failed assassination attempt on the Italian viceroy, killed thousands of Ethiopian civilians. The Italians used mustard gas against Ethiopian troops and civilians. The occupation was brutal by any measure.

But the architecture remained. The Piazza's buildings -- the low arcaded storefronts, the wrought-iron balconies, the ochre and cream facades that line the main streets -- bear the unmistakable imprint of Italian colonial modernism. There is a pastry shop on a corner that has been selling cappuccino and cornetti since the Italian period. The espresso culture of Addis Ababa, which you will encounter everywhere on this walk, arrived with the Italians and never left. Ethiopia grows some of the finest coffee in the world -- the word coffee itself likely derives from Kaffa, an Ethiopian region -- and the combination of Italian espresso technique with Ethiopian beans produced a coffee culture of exceptional quality.

Start your walk from this square and look at the buildings around you. The Italian facades are ageing now, cracked and faded in places, the arcade columns worn smooth. But they stand, and they are part of this city's layered history: a reminder that even a failed empire leaves physical traces, and that the people who survived the occupation decided to inhabit those traces on their own terms.

Menelik commissioned St George's in thanksgiving immediately after the battle. The church is dedicated to St George because George is the patron saint of soldiers and warriors in the Ethiopian Orthodox tradition, and because this victory was understood as a miracle of faith as much as a triumph of military organisation. The cathedral was consecrated in eighteen ninety-seven, and Menelik's coronation ceremony was held here, as was the coronation of Haile Selassie in nineteen thirty.

The interior is extraordinary. The walls are covered in murals by Afewerk Tekle, one of Ethiopia's greatest modern artists, who painted biblical and historical scenes in a style that fuses the formal traditions of Ethiopian Orthodox iconography with twentieth-century influences. The colours are deep and jewel-like -- the same intensity you find in illuminated manuscripts from the medieval monasteries of Lake Tana and the church of Debre Berhan Selassie in Gondar. The figures are elongated, the expressions intense, the gold leaf catching the light that comes through the high windows.

Ethiopia's Orthodox Christian tradition is among the oldest in the world. The Ethiopian church claims continuous existence from the conversion of King Ezana of Axum in the fourth century AD, pre-dating the Christianisation of most of Europe. The theological and artistic tradition that produced the paintings inside St George's is not borrowed from Rome or Constantinople -- it developed in isolation for centuries, drawing on its own scriptural interpretations, its own liturgical language of Ge'ez, and its own visual traditions. What you see on these walls grew out of that independent stream.

The palace was Haile Selassie's primary residence and the seat of his government. The rooms are preserved much as they were during his reign: the imperial throne room with its gilded furniture and portraits, the private apartments with their personal effects, the formal reception rooms where he met foreign heads of state and managed the intricate politics of a court system that combined feudal hierarchies with modern state bureaucracy. Walking through these rooms, you get a sense of a man who understood ceremony deeply -- who used the theatre of monarchy with enormous skill -- and who was also, by the end of his reign, profoundly out of touch with the realities of the country he governed.

The ethnological collection on the museum's other floors is the counterpoint: the material culture of the dozens of ethnic groups and linguistic communities that make up Ethiopia's extraordinary diversity. Ethiopia has more than eighty distinct languages. The objects in this museum -- the textiles, the religious artefacts, the agricultural tools, the musical instruments, the jewellery -- represent a range of cultures as varied as anything on the African continent. Ethiopia is not a monolithic place. It is a federation of peoples held together by a strong central state and a shared sense of national identity that is itself a remarkable achievement given that diversity.

The fossil was identified as a new species: Australopithecus afarensis. Lucy was small -- about one metre tall, roughly twenty-nine kilograms -- bipedal, and possessed of a brain significantly smaller than a modern human. She walked upright on two legs, which was the critical discovery: bipedalism preceded the expansion of the human brain by more than a million years, overturning the prevailing assumption that big brains and walking upright had evolved together. Lucy pushed back the known record of upright-walking hominids by more than a million years at the time of her discovery.

The name Lucy came from the Beatles song 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,' which was playing on a tape recorder in the camp on the evening of the discovery while Johanson's team celebrated. In Amharic, the official language of Ethiopia, she is called Dinkinesh, meaning 'you are marvellous' -- a name that captures something the scientific designation does not.

The skeleton in this basement is a cast. The original bones are held in secure storage and brought out only for specific research purposes. But the cast is accurate in every detail, and standing in front of it -- looking at the small curve of that pelvis, the length of those arm bones, the fragment of skull -- you feel the weight of the time involved. Three point two million years. The species that produced Lucy was not Homo sapiens. It was something earlier, something transitional. But it walked. It moved through the landscape of eastern Africa on two legs. And four million years of evolution later, you are standing in a basement in Addis Ababa looking at what remained.

The festival is celebrated in late September, and the combination of the end of the rainy season, the explosion of yellow Meskel daisies that cover the hillsides around Addis Ababa, and the religious observance creates a convergence that feels genuinely ancient. UNESCO added the Meskel celebration to its list of Intangible Cultural Heritage in twenty twenty-three.

The square is named for the festival and was built in its current form during the Derg period -- the military junta that governed Ethiopia from nineteen seventy-four to nineteen ninety-one. Under the Derg, it was known as Revolution Square and was the site of political rallies and military parades of the kind that authoritarian governments use to demonstrate mass support. The name changed after the Derg fell, but the square's function as the city's primary gathering space remained. Addis Ababa's major events -- national celebrations, political demonstrations, religious observances -- happen here, in this vast open space that the city built for exactly these moments of collective experience.

The exterior of Holy Trinity Cathedral is an extraordinary synthesis of traditional Ethiopian ecclesiastical architecture and European neo-Gothic influence -- a combination that reflects the Ethiopian church's ancient roots and its twentieth-century engagement with the wider Christian world. The interior is decorated with murals, stained glass, and carvings that blend Orthodox iconographic traditions with Art Deco styling.

In the cathedral garden, alongside Haile Selassie's tomb, are the graves of the Ethiopian Patriots -- the resistance fighters who maintained guerrilla operations against the Italian occupation throughout the five years of the conquest. These were men and women who fought in the highlands and forests of Ethiopia with minimal outside support, keeping resistance alive in the years when Haile Selassie was in exile and the world had largely accepted the Italian conquest as a fait accompli. They are buried here because their sacrifice and the emperor's restoration belong together, in the same ground, under the same sky.

For Rastafari pilgrims, the tomb of Haile Selassie is a destination of profound religious significance. The Rastafari movement, which emerged in Jamaica in the nineteen thirties, holds Haile Selassie as a divine figure -- the returned Messiah, the Lion of Judah, Jah Rastafari. That belief transformed an Ethiopian emperor into a global religious icon, connecting Ethiopia to the African diaspora in the Caribbean and the Americas in ways that had no precedent. The pilgrims who come here from Jamaica, from Trinidad, from Britain and the United States, are not misunderstanding something -- they are honouring a connection that the twentieth century made real.

The buildings along Churchill Avenue represent the full range of Addis Ababa's architectural history: Italian colonial buildings from the occupation period, government structures from the Haile Selassie era in a kind of imperial modernism, Soviet-inflected concrete blocks from the Derg period, and the glass and steel towers that have been rising across the city as Ethiopia's economy has expanded rapidly in the twenty-first century. Ethiopia has been one of the fastest-growing economies in Africa for most of the past two decades, and the construction activity visible along this boulevard -- cranes, scaffolding, new towers rising beside fifty-year-old blocks -- is the physical expression of that growth.

The street vendors and the coffee shops and the minibus taxis that crowd every intersection make Churchill Avenue feel alive in a specifically Ethiopian way. The minibuses -- small Toyota vans that function as the primary public transport across Addis Ababa -- move in a constant dense flow, their conductors leaning from the sliding doors calling the destination names. The coffee shops serve that combination of Italian espresso technique and Ethiopian beans that the city has made its own. Stand at a pavement cafe on Churchill Avenue, order a macchiato, and watch the city move around you. This is Addis Ababa at its most itself.

The Derg declared Ethiopia a socialist state, aligned the country with the Soviet Union, and proceeded to implement land reform and nationalisation policies that were genuinely popular in some respects and catastrophically mismanaged in others. The Red Terror was the regime's response to the White Terror carried out by the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Party, an opposition group that had begun assassinating Derg officials. Mengistu escalated the violence to a level the opposition could not match: door-to-door searches, mass arrests, public executions, the display of bodies in the streets as warnings. Families were charged fees to collect the bodies of their executed relatives.

The museum holds photographs, documents, and physical evidence from this period: the weapons used, the identity documents of victims, testimony from survivors and witnesses. The most powerful installation is a row of glass cases containing human skulls and bones collected from mass graves. These are the remains of actual individuals, brought here to be acknowledged and mourned publicly rather than left in the anonymity of the ground.

Ethiopia has undertaken a serious national reckoning with the Derg period. Mengistu was tried in absentia and convicted of genocide in two thousand and six. He has lived in exile in Zimbabwe since the Derg's fall in nineteen ninety-one, protected by Robert Mugabe's government and its successors. The victims of the Red Terror have not been forgotten.

The organisation of Mercato follows a logic that is not immediately obvious to the first-time visitor but becomes clear once you understand the principle: the market is organised by commodity. There is a spice section, where the smells of berbere, cardamom, fenugreek, and black cumin reach you before you see the stalls. There is a textile district, where bolts of shemma -- the traditional Ethiopian white cotton cloth with its coloured border -- are stacked to the ceiling. There is a hardware section, a gold jewellery section, a section for traditional musical instruments, a section for electronic goods, a section for recycled and repaired items of every description. If you know where you are going, you can find almost anything in Mercato. If you do not know where you are going, you will get lost, which is also not the worst thing that can happen to you here.

The people who run Mercato are primarily women. The female traders of Addis Ababa have controlled the city's retail commerce for generations, and Mercato is their stronghold. The women who sit behind the piles of spices or the bolts of cloth or the stacks of injera -- the large, spongy sourdough flatbread that is the foundation of Ethiopian cuisine, made from teff flour -- have often inherited their spots from their mothers. The knowledge of what sells, what prices hold, who the reliable wholesalers are, and how to read the market's fluctuations is passed down within families and trading communities over decades.

Stop and buy something. A small bag of berbere spice blend, a piece of shemma cloth, a few injera to eat with your hands as you walk. Eating while you walk through Mercato is completely normal and completely delicious.

Menelik's wife, Empress Taytu Betul, was the person who named the new city. The court had been moving between different sites in the highlands -- Entoto was cold and windy, and Taytu preferred the lower, warmer plain below -- and when she found a hot spring in the valley, she named the settlement that grew up around it Addis Ababa, meaning New Flower in Amharic. Taytu was not simply a consort. She was a significant political force in her own right, deeply involved in the diplomacy and strategy that led to the victory at Adwa, and a founder of the city in the literal sense: she chose its location, gave it its name, and oversaw the initial construction.

The springs and the shade and the lower elevation made Addis Ababa more liveable than Entoto, and the capital shifted downhill over the course of the eighteen nineties. But the hilltop retained its spiritual significance. Entoto Maryam remains one of the most venerated pilgrimage sites in the Ethiopian Orthodox calendar. On the feast of the Virgin Mary, which falls on the twenty-first of every month in the Ethiopian calendar, thousands of white-robed pilgrims climb this hill before dawn to pray, filling the eucalyptus forest with the sound of chanting and the smell of incense.

Look down at the city from here and hold what you have seen today: the Italian Piazza and the victory it failed to prevent, the cathedral built in thanksgiving for Adwa, the palace of an emperor who became a god to people across the ocean, the bones of a three-million-year-old ancestor, the square that fills with fire and song each September, the grave of the emperor himself, the boulevard named for a British prime minister, the museum of a terror that must not be forgotten, the market that has been trading since before you were born. This is Addis Ababa -- New Flower, Africa's highest city, the continent's diplomatic capital, a place that defeated empire and has been building itself ever since.