Leyland Cecco | The Pilgrims

Photo © Leyland Cecco-All Rights Reserved

Leyland Cecco is a freelance photographer, writer and history teacher based in Cairo, Egypt, and has photographed in Uganda, Ethiopia, Turkey, Northern Iraq and Palestine, as well as in Iran, Syria and Egypt. His work has been featured by Al Jazeera, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Sunday Times, Roads and Kingdoms, The Daily Beast, Vocativ, Popular Archaeology, and other international publications.

I particularly liked Pilgrims, his work from Lalibela, where he followed pilgrims to this town in northern Ethiopia, famous for its monolithic rock-cut churches. It's one of Ethiopia's holiest cities, second only to Aksum, and is a center of pilgrimage for much of the country. Its population is almost completely Ethiopian Orthodox Christian. The layout and names of the major buildings in Lalibela are widely accepted, especially by the local clergy, to be a symbolic representation of Jerusalem.

Larger sized photographs of this series have also been featured by Roads & Kingdoms, an independent journal of food, politics, travel and culture. It was voted the 2013 Gold Winner for Best Travel Journalism Site by the Society of American Travel Writers.