Menelik II (1844-1913).Īs dawn broke over the parched landscape, Ras (Prince) Alula stood like an unblinking sentinel while his Tirgrayan warriors snored around him. Despite their fears, the Italian troopers pushed on, knowing that they must reach their positions before daybreak.
They suggested that an unimaginable 100,000-man horde of Ethiopian defenders, assembled by Emperor Menelik II, was perched atop the Adwa Mountains somewhere in the distance. The tales the indigeni told were not promising. The soldiers had overheard reports from the indigenous Ethiopian scouts after the renegade tribesmen returned from the front lines. In hushed whispers, nervous conscripts debated what lay ahead as they stumbled through the soupy darkness. With less than four days’ worth of rations and even less water, the walrus-mustached commander of the Italian army, Oreste Baratieri, hoped to save his men from starvation by making an audacious surprise assault on the much larger enemy force arrayed against them. Enjoy this video telling you about the Little Rome of East Africa, Asmara, the beautiful city embodying feminine grace and beauty.Under the cover of the dusty Ethiopian night, the 17,000-man Italian Royal Expeditionary force scrambled over ragged hills and inactive volcanoes in the early morning hours of March 1, 1896. Not built for Eritreans, Italians built Asmara primarily for themselves, as indicated by separate areas designated for Italians and Eritreans, each disproportionately sized. Asmara represents perhaps one of the most concentrated and intact assemblage of Modernist architecture anywhere in the world. Since then, Asmara has benefited from a strong Italian architecture, and was called Piccola Roma ( Little Rome) because of its strong resemblance to Rome. In 1889, Asmara was occupied by the Italy, and was made the capital city of Eritrea by Governor Martini in 1897. He built a palace on top of a hill in the center of Asmara from there, he devoted himself to defending the northern borders of Ethiopia against Italian, and Anglo-Egyptian aggressors. Once Ras Alula became governor of this province, he moved the capital from Debarwa to Asmara.
On October 9 th, 1876, the Emperor of Ethiopia, Yohannes IV, made his greatest war general Ras Alula, governor of Medri Bahri. In the early days, Asmara was part of the kingdom of Medri Bahri, a medieval kingdom in the Horn of Africa, whose capital was Debarwa. Only Eritreans, and their neighbors remain loyal to the original pronunciation, Asmera. Arbaete Asmera literally means in Tigrinya language, “ the four (feminine plural) made them unite.” Eventually Arbaete was dropped and it has been called Asmera, which means “ they made them unite.” Majority of non-Eritreans call it by the Italianized version of the word: Asmara. The men accepted, hence the name Arbaete Asmera. These clans fought each other until the women of each clan decided that to preserve peace, the four clans should unite. Originally, there were four clans living in the Asmara area on the Kebessa plateau: the Gheza Gurtom, the Gheza Shelele, the Gheza Serenser, and the Gheza Asmae. The Tigrinya and Tigre people live around there. Asmara, the capital of Eritrea, was an Italian built colonial city whose origins date back to 800 BC and 400 BC. Ever since I was a child, I always loved the sound of the name ‘ Asmara,’ not knowing that it was feminine by nature (which might explain my fascination with it).
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