The story
Ashendye Festival in Lalibela
Ashendye is Lalibela's local name for a northern Ethiopian festival reserved for girls and young women, held as the sixteen-day Filseta fast ends around the Feast of the Dormition of the Virgin Mary. Groups dress in new embroidered clothes with grass skirts, then sing and dance house to house, a lighter, community-facing counterpoint to Lalibela's usual church-centered pilgrimage calendar.
As Ethiopia's sixteen-day Filseta fast draws to a close each year around the Feast of the Dormition of the Virgin Mary, towns across the northern highlands hold their own version of a festival reserved specifically for girls and young women, and in Lalibela that local variant carries the name Ashendye.