🇪🇹 Ethiopia
Bahir Dar
Bahir Dar (ባህር ዳር — "Shore of the Sea" in Amharic, population 356,000 — the capital of the Amhara Region of Ethiopia and the gateway to two of the most extraordinary natural and cultural sites in Africa) is the city on the southern shore of Lake Tana (the largest lake in Ethiopia, 3,600 km², the source of the Blue Nile River — the river that provides 85% of the water in the Nile as it flows north through Sudan and Egypt): the Blue Nile (the "Abbay" in Amharic — the "Great River": the river that drains Lake Tana through the Blue Nile Gorge (one of the deepest gorges in Africa: the gorge cuts 1,500m into the Ethiopian plateau over 450km) and the Blue Nile Falls (Tis Abay — "Smoke of the Nile" in Amharic: the waterfall 30km south of Bahir Dar where the Blue Nile drops 37–45m over a 400m wide basalt lip: the most spectacular waterfall in Ethiopia and one of the most important waterfalls in Africa)). Lake Tana contains 37 islands, 20 of which have monasteries or churches: the island monasteries of Lake Tana (the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo monasteries founded between the 14th and 17th centuries on the island sanctuaries of Lake Tana — the most important collection of medieval Ethiopian Christian art and religious objects in the world: the monasteries contain the original "tabot" (the replica of the Ark of the Covenant — the most sacred object in Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity: every Ethiopian Orthodox church contains a tabot, and the Lake Tana island monasteries are believed to contain some of the most ancient and most sacred tabots in Ethiopia), illuminated Ge'ez manuscripts (the hand-painted vellum gospels of the 14th–16th centuries), and the mummified remains of former Ethiopian emperors.