{"id":152,"date":"2026-10-26T08:54:46","date_gmt":"2026-10-26T12:54:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/shewa.org\/index\/?p=152"},"modified":"2026-10-04T18:09:46","modified_gmt":"2026-10-04T22:09:46","slug":"addis-ababa-as-a-shewan-city-entoto-the-palace-and-the-choice-of-a-capital","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shewa.org\/index\/152","title":{"rendered":"Addis Ababa as a Shewan City: Entoto, the Palace and the Choice of a Capital"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Addis Ababa is now one of the largest cities in Africa, and it is easy to forget where it came from. It was not a colonial port or an old trading town that grew by accident. It was a Shewan royal camp that became a capital, founded by a Shewan king and queen on ground that had been part of the Shewan story for centuries.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-large wp-image-177\" src=\"https:\/\/shewa.org\/index\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/entoto-maryam-church-ninaras-2017-2.jpg\" alt=\"Entoto Maryam Church\" width=\"790\" srcset=\"https:\/\/shewa.org\/index\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/entoto-maryam-church-ninaras-2017-2.jpg 1920w, https:\/\/shewa.org\/index\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/entoto-maryam-church-ninaras-2017-2-300x200.jpg 300w, https:\/\/shewa.org\/index\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/entoto-maryam-church-ninaras-2017-2-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/shewa.org\/index\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/entoto-maryam-church-ninaras-2017-2-768x512.jpg 768w, https:\/\/shewa.org\/index\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/entoto-maryam-church-ninaras-2017-2-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\" \/><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/U_UrWFmtk_w\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>This article follows that story from the ridge of Entoto down to the palace and the city.<\/p>\n<h2>Entoto before Menelik<\/h2>\n<p>The heights of Entoto rise north of the city. They have a long memory. In the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries the Ethiopian kings kept a fortified town called Barara, which was sacked in 1529 during the wars with Adal. Historians still debate where it stood. Mount Entoto is one of the sites proposed, and recent survey work has found a large walled medieval settlement of about 30 hectares between the rock-hewn church of Washa Mikael and the later church of Entoto Maryam.<\/p>\n<p>Whether or not that identification is confirmed, Menelik&#8217;s court believed it was returning to an old royal place. Bernhard Lindahl&#8217;s gazetteer records that Menelik&#8217;s first &#8220;Entoto&#8221; (1879 to 1881) stood on a spur of Mount Wechecha, about 15 kilometres west of the present city. In 1881 he moved to the present Entoto, a site then called Dildilla, because his chronicler Gebre Selassie says they had found there the true site of the former capital. The name Entoto came with him.<\/p>\n<p>So the move south was not a leap into empty country. It was, in the court&#8217;s own understanding, a return.<\/p>\n<h2>The dates, honestly told<\/h2>\n<p>Different sources give different years for Menelik&#8217;s move from the Ankober country. Lindahl writes that Ankober was Menelik&#8217;s main seat until 1878. The Swiss engineer Alfred Ilg and his companions were assigned houses at Entoto and moved there in April 1879. The chronicler&#8217;s account puts the move to the present Entoto in 1881. Through the 1870s Menelik also spent long periods at Liche, west of Ankober, where many of his letters were written.<\/p>\n<p>The safest summary is this. In the late 1870s and early 1880s, the Shewan court moved step by step from the eastern escarpment towards Entoto, and in 1886 it came down from the ridge to found Addis Ababa.<\/p>\n<h2>Taytu and the hot springs<\/h2>\n<p>Entoto was high, cold and windy. Below it, in a valley the Oromo called Finfinne, a name that refers to its hot springs, was warmer ground. In 1886 settlement began there. The site was chosen by Taytu Betul, Menelik&#8217;s wife. She built a house near the Filwuha hot springs, where she and members of the Shewan court liked to bathe, and persuaded Menelik to move down. She gave the new town its name, Addis Ababa, &#8220;new flower.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Taytu had already put her mark on Entoto. She founded the church of Saint Mary there, Entoto Maryam. In that church, on 3 November 1889, Abuna Mattewos, the bishop of Shewa, crowned Menelik emperor of Ethiopia. After Menelik&#8217;s death in 1913, Taytu lived out her last years in the old palace on Entoto beside the church she had founded.<\/p>\n<h2>A city laid out like an army<\/h2>\n<p>The early city followed the logic of a Shewan royal camp. By 1887 large plots of land, called <em>sefer<\/em> (a word that came to mean a neighbourhood or quarter), were granted to the great nobles, officials and churches. The plan mirrored an army on the march. The palace was in the centre. The commanders of the left wing (<em>Qegnazmach<\/em>) and the right wing (<em>Grazmach<\/em>) were placed on either side. The lands of Fitawrari Habte Giyorgis lay furthest west.<\/p>\n<p>Each sefer was settled by the retainers of its lord, drawn from the lands he governed. That is why so many old Addis Ababa neighbourhoods still carry the names of nobles, offices and churches. Many of the original grants can still be traced.<\/p>\n<p>Houses were round, with walls of mud and straw (<em>chiqa<\/em>) on a timber frame and thatched roofs. One of Menelik&#8217;s contributions can still be seen on any drive through the city: the eucalyptus trees he had planted along its streets.<\/p>\n<h2>The palace<\/h2>\n<p>At the centre stood the <em>gebbi<\/em>, the royal compound now often called the Menelik Palace or the Great Gebbi. It was the seat of Ethiopian emperors for nearly a century.<\/p>\n<p>Its great hall, the Gibr Adarash, was built for the <em>gibir<\/em>, the royal feasts at which Menelik fed huge numbers of his subjects. That is a Shewan idea of kingship in a single building. The king was a host as well as a judge and a commander, and the hall was made to hold the whole of his following. Haile Selassie later used it for the banquet of African heads of state who founded the Organization of African Unity in 1963.<\/p>\n<p>The compound also holds churches. The most important, the Ta&#8217;eka Negest Ba&#8217;eta Le Mariam (its name means &#8220;Resting Place of Kings&#8221;), serves as the mausoleum of Menelik, Empress Taytu and Empress Zewditu. The throne hall, the Zufan Adarash, was the room for imperial audiences.<\/p>\n<p>Under the Derg the same compound was turned into a prison for the officials of Haile Selassie&#8217;s government, and the cellars of the Zufan Adarash were used to hold prisoners during the Red Terror. Restoration began in 2018, and in 2019 the grounds opened to the public as Unity Park. Shewans who walk through it today walk through the whole arc of their history, from royal feast to prison to museum.<\/p>\n<h2>From Shewan camp to national capital<\/h2>\n<p>Addis Ababa grew fast. It attracted nobles, soldiers, priests, artisans, merchants and foreign visitors. Amhara, Oromo, Gurage, Dorze and Tigrayan people came in the largest numbers. Embassies followed once the city became the imperial capital in 1889.<\/p>\n<p>It was from this new Shewan capital that Menelik issued his <em>awaj<\/em>, the formal call to arms, in September 1895, when Italian forces advanced into Tigray. At Adwa, on 1 March 1896, a column of about 25,000 men from the Shewan units and part of Menelik&#8217;s bodyguard seized a rocky spur north-west of Mount Belah and outflanked the Italian line. After Adwa, Ethiopia remained one of the few independent countries in Africa, and the only one to owe its independence to a military victory.<\/p>\n<p>The city was also where some of the institutions that now feel ancient were born. The <em>iddir<\/em>, the neighbourhood burial association that is part of almost every Ethiopian community today, first developed among migrants in early twentieth-century Addis Ababa, according to the social historians Alula Pankhurst and Damen Haile Mariam. People far from their home parishes needed a way to bury their dead with dignity in a new place. They built one, and from the Italian occupation onwards it spread across the country. We will come back to the iddir in our next article.<\/p>\n<h2>Why it mattered that the capital was in Shewa<\/h2>\n<p>Menelik could have ruled from somewhere else. Earlier emperors had lived in moving camps or in Gondar. He chose to build the capital inside Shewa, at the point where the Shewan heartland met the lands to the south and west.<\/p>\n<p>The result was that the old Shewan court culture became the national court culture. The language of the capital, its church calendar, its feasts, its titles and its way of laying out land all came from Shewa. For most of the twentieth century Addis Ababa sat inside the province of Shewa. It was only in 1981 that the Derg made Addis Ababa an administrative region of its own, separate from the province around it.<\/p>\n<p>That separation was administrative. The city&#8217;s founding was Shewan, and its oldest landmarks, Entoto Maryam, the gebbi and the Ta&#8217;eka Negest, are monuments of Shewan civilization. To understand Addis Ababa, start on Entoto, look south at the hot springs where Taytu built her first house, and remember the king and queen who came down from the ridge in 1886.<\/p>\n<h2>Sources<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>Bernhard Lindahl, <em>Local History in Ethiopia<\/em> (Nordic Africa Institute), entries for Intoto (Entoto) and Ankober, citing Menelik&#8217;s chronicler Gebre Selassie, Berlan (1963), Keller&#8217;s life of Alfred Ilg (1918) and Cecchi (1886). <a href=\"https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/2007\/http:\/\/www.nai.uu.se\/library\/resources\/dossiers\/local_history_of_ethiopia\/I\/ORTINT.pdf\">Local History in Ethiopia, Entoto entry<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20070616231907\/http:\/\/www.nai.uu.se\/library\/resources\/dossiers\/local_history_of_ethiopia\/A\/ORTAN.pdf\">Local History in Ethiopia, Ankober entry<\/a><\/li>\n<li>Bernhard Lindahl, <em>Local History in Ethiopia<\/em>, Liche entry. <a href=\"https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/2007\/http:\/\/www.nai.uu.se\/library\/resources\/dossiers\/local_history_of_ethiopia\/L\/ORTLI.pdf\">Local History in Ethiopia, Liche entry<\/a><\/li>\n<li>Alula Pankhurst and Damen Haile Mariam, &#8220;The Iddir in Ethiopia: Historical Development, Social Function, and Potential Role in HIV\/AIDS Prevention and Control,&#8221; <em>Northeast African Studies<\/em> 7, no. 2 (2000): 35\u00e2\u20ac\u201c57. <a href=\"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1353\/nas.2004.0018\">The Iddir in Ethiopia<\/a><\/li>\n<li>Statoids, &#8220;Regions of Ethiopia&#8221; (1981 separation of Addis Ababa from Shewa). <a href=\"https:\/\/www.statoids.com\/uet.html\">Regions of Ethiopia<\/a><\/li>\n<li>Wikipedia, &#8220;Addis Ababa,&#8221; &#8220;Entoto,&#8221; &#8220;Menelik Palace,&#8221; &#8220;Menelik II,&#8221; &#8220;Taytu Betul,&#8221; &#8220;Battle of Adwa.&#8221; <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Addis_Ababa\">Addis Ababa<\/a> , <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Entoto\">Entoto<\/a> , <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Menelik_Palace\">Menelik Palace<\/a> , <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Menelik_II\">Menelik II<\/a> , <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Taytu_Betul\">Taytu Betul<\/a> , <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Battle_of_Adwa\">Battle of Adwa<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><em>Image: Photo by Ninaras, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Ethiopia&#8217;s capital was built by the Shewan court on Shewan ground, and its hills, palace and old neighbourhoods still show the shape of the kingdom that made it.addis-ababa<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Addis Ababa is now one of the largest cities in Africa, and it is easy to forget where it came from. It was not a colonial port or [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":177,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shewa.org\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shewa.org\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shewa.org\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shewa.org\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shewa.org\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=152"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/shewa.org\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":195,"href":"https:\/\/shewa.org\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152\/revisions\/195"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shewa.org\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/177"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shewa.org\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shewa.org\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shewa.org\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}