Chalacot

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Chalacot is a village in the Tigray Region of Ethiopia. It is located in the Enderta woreda of the Debubawi Zone, 10 kilometers north of Antalo and 17 kilometers south of Mek'ele. The Central Statistical Agency has not published an estimate for this village's 2005 population.

Ras Wolde Selassie made Chalacot his capital, and received Henry Salt there in 1810. He built a palace in the village, as well as houses for his wives and the church Chelekot Selassie, which Philips Briggs described as an "archetectural impressive example of the circular tikul styles of paintings" and "covered in beautiful 19th-century paintings".[1] When Wolde Selassie died in Chalacot (1816), his nephew Walda Rufa'el sacked it.[2]

It had recovered by the 1840s when Ferret and Galiner visited it, who described it as "one of the principal towns" of Ethiopia, with a population of 3,000 living in well-constructed houses and well-kept gardens. However, a little more than generation later Chalacot had declined; Massaia found only 200 houses with about 1,000 inhabitants and in the 1880's Wylde reported he counted only 80 houses there. The town suffered further losses during the First Italo–Ethiopian War according to Richard Pankhurst, who included Chalacot in a list of northern Ethiopian towns affected by the "disturbed conditions of the times."[3]

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Philip Briggs, Ethiopia: the Bradt Travel Guide, third edition (London: Bradt, 2002), p. 269
  2. ^ Richard R.K. Pankhurst, History of Ethiopian Towns: From the Middle Ages to the Early Nineteenth Century (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1982), pp. 207f
  3. ^ Richard R.K. Pankhurst, Economic History of Ethiopia (Addis Ababa: Haile Sellasie I University, 1968), pp. 691f
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