Site visited April 2015. The small and puzzling site of Tiya left me with mixed feelings. For me it was the first taste of Ethiopia and as such it was an exciting journey. But if you are not a WHS or cultural history enthusiast the experience could be underwhelming.

Tiya is an early inscription from 1980. Although it is quite near Addis Ababa it is not very easy place to reach. In theory there should be some bus connection but I wouldn’t count on it. In practice the only reasonable way to visit Tiya is to hire a car and a driver which I did via local travel agency.

I had arrived in Ethiopia just a few hours earlier. In the morning, after two hours of sleep, the driver picked me up from my hotel. The journey in the countryside south of Addis Ababa was fascinating as we stopped along the route to admire nice views and meet some shepherds of Oromo people.

After three hours we arrived in the site of Tiya. There was someone who collected a small entrance fee and also a souvenir seller in a small hut. Besides them I was the only visitor.

The site is very small with 36 steles in three clusters. The steles are up to two meters in height and some of them lie on the ground. Almost all the stones have engravings which include swords, circles, false banana trees and some unidentified symbols. There have been different hypotheses about the reason for their existence. Bones have been discovered beneath the steles which might indicate that Tiya is a burial site and the steles are the grave markers of some lost civilization.

My driver told that in this area there are almost two hundred same kind of steles. He said that the plan is to gather more stones from the surrounding area and to bring them to this site because there the stones are better taken care of. I don’t know if that is true. Some renovations have been made just before my visit as they had paved the footpaths around the steles. There was also a new museum being built at the time my visit.

Usually the tours to Tiya include also visits to Melka Kunture archaeological site and Adadi Maryam church because they are located along the route. Adadi Maryam is the same kind of rock-hewn church than the ones in Lalibela but in much more smaller scale. Unfortunately Melka Kunture site was closed at the time of my visit.

Ethiopia is full of remarkable World Heritage Sites but Tiya is not quite in the same class. Spectacular is not the right word for this site. Visiting it is of importance for WHS enthusiasts, like me, but is it as itself worth a long and costly journey - I don’t know. I’m happy that I visited this strange and remote site but I can’t recommend it for everyone.