ሰቆጣ / Sekota

History

Philip Briggs speculates that this town may be identified with the mysterious Kubar, said by al-Ya'qubi and al-Masudi to have succeeded Axum as the capital of Ethiopia. Sekota is the historic seat of the Wagshum, the former ruler of Lasta, who claimed to trace an unbroken succession back to the last king of the Zagwe dynasty. However, verification for this tradition is slight. This town is not mentioned in the surviving records until 1746, when the soldiers of Emperor Iyasu II burned it down. The traveler Augustus B. Wylde wrote in the 1890s that the palace of the Wagshums in this town had been built around 1650. It was a three-storey structure which could not be dated with any precision, but he believed the masons and craftsmen were some of those who had worked at Gondar. Nathaniel Pearce, notes that Sekota was where Ras Haile Wand Bewossen had his palace in 1813, and performed his annual review of his troops on 17 Masqaram, as was the custom. Charles Beke, who passed through Sekota in April 1843, described it as "a place of considerable size but is so very straggling that it is not easy to form a definite idea on the subject. It has a large market, held on Tuesday and Wednesday weekly, which is frequented by the merchants of the south and west, this place is the grand center of the salt-trade, the Tigre merchants coming thus far only, and then returning." In Wylde's time, the market at Sekota was still held each week on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. During the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, Sekota was occupied by the Italians on 28 March 1936. During their occupation, the Italians built a road to Sekota passable by motorcars, and repaired the town's mosque. Sekota was briefly held by the Tigrayan People's Liberation Front (TPLF) during the Ethiopian Civil War around…