Happy Epiphany

ADDIS ABABA (AFP) - A sea of faithful resplendently dressed in white have filled the streets of the Ethiopian capital to celebrate the annual Epiphany, or the baptism of Jesus Christ.

Jubilant crowds from Addis Ababa's 13 Orthodox Churches descended on city streets for the religious ritual, locally known as "Timkat", marked on the 11th day of the fifth month in accordance with the Orthodox calender.

Making prayer pit-stops, the procession walked behind replicas of tablets of the Biblical Ten Commandments, removed once a year during the festival from the Ark of the Covenant -- the vessel in which the Commandments are believed to have been held and which the Orthodox church here maintains is located in Ethiopia.

Children, adorned in the national red, orange and green colours, walked alongside white-veiled adults as they belted out hymns and beat drums. The priests from the hexagonal churches and the monks and nuns wore their most ornate robes and habits.
"The message is, this is the feast of our faith, the baptism of our Lord Jesus Christ is for our own sake," said Abuna Paulos, the patriarch of the country's 35,000 Orthodox churches.
"When we speak about religion or about Christianity, we are speaking about peace," he told AFP.
Second only to Christmas in religious importance to Ethiopians, the festival attracts hundreds of thousands of faithful and tourists to Addis Ababa and is capped by a water drenching session to symbolise the baptism of Jesus Christ.

According to the church's lore, Ethiopia's first emperor Menelik I took the Ark of the Covenant from Jews in Jerusalem because they had lost faith and were no longer observing God's commandments handed down to Moses on Mount Sinai.
Menelik I, the founder of the Ethiopian empire, is traditionally believed to be the son of the Biblical King Solomon and Queen Sheba.

He is said to have brought the Ark of the Covenant to Ethiopia after the destruction of Solomon's Temple and according to that legend, the Ark should be preciously conserved in the Axoum church north of the country.
At the festival, the tablets from the 13 Addis Ababa churches are placed in the middle of the crowd, which holds night-long prayers before the symbolic baptism.
The faithful seek out blessings from the priests, prostating themselves before crosses as women touch the grounds trodden by Abuna and touch their childrens' foreheads as a symbol of blessing to their offspring.

At dawn of the following day, Abuna plunges a giant cross in water to bless the crowd and later spray pipes are turned on to shower the swollen crowd of believers, the most faithful of whom will remain fully dressed for the dowsing.