Wehni

Wehni is the name of one of the mountains of Ethiopia where most of the male heirs to the Emperor of Ethiopia were interned, usually for life. It was the last of the three such mountains, or amba, said to have been used for that purpose, the other two being Debre Damo and Amba Geshen.

From some undetermined time in history, it was the custom that when the Emperor assumed the throne, his brothers and other male relatives would be taken to a royal prison, where they would live until either they were called forth to become the new emperor or died. Mount Wehni was first used as a prison by Fasilides, when he exiled his son Dawit there for leading a revolt. The mountain was abandoned as a prison during the Zemene Mesafint; more precisely in the 1790s, as Samuel Gobat learned from one Tekla Selassie, "a relative of the king" (that is, the Emperor of Ethiopia).

Although James Bruce first mentions the existence of the royal prison at Wehni, Thomas Pakenham was the first European to visit the site, in 1955. He notes that when he started to search for this half-forgotten complex, there were three possible locations for the prison in the province of Begemder, now part of the Amhara Region of Ethiopia: the Ethiopian expert Steven Wright believed it lay three days' journey to the west of Gondar; a Colonel Shifferaw, who was familiar with the area, knew of two locations to the east of Gondar. Pakenham's explorations determined that it lay in the mountains to the northeast of Emfraz, and he recorded his first clear view of it:

Pakenham found at the foot of the mountain a village that "hardly deserved the name". Although he found the inhabitants "wretched and poor", inspecting the local church he found a number of paintings that he dated to the 17th century, "fifty years after Fasil in fact, but were exciting evidence of the importance of Wehni at the time. Though the church and village were now so dilapidated, it was obvious that once they had enjoyed royal patronage as munificent as Gondar itself."

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