60 Minutes - 12/22/2019: Mark Bradford, The Pavarotti of Pasta, Built by Angels

Episode Date: December 23, 2019

Anderson Cooper profiles artist Mark Bradford, who tackles complex social and political issues through abstract works; Then, 60 Minutes travels to Italy to meet Chef Massimo Bottura, whose kitchen creations are works of art; And, inside Lalibela, the mysterious holy site visited by 200,000 Ethiopian Christians on their annual pilgrimage. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Mark Bradford is widely considered one of the most important and influential artists in America today. His abstract canvases, which often deal with complex social and political issues, hang in major museums around the world. That's all right. That is all right. It's like an archaeological dig. It is like an archaeological dig. It's like history. I'm creating my own archaeological or psychological digs. Sometimes when I'm digging on my own painting, I'm asking myself, well, exactly what are you digging for? Where are you ready? What a go child.

The restaurant ranked number one in the world last year is in the little known town of Modena, Italy, Osteria Francescana, where you have to wait months to get a reservation. Caesar salad in bloom. Chef Massimo Battura says it wasn't always like this. Those are flowers? All flowers, edible flowers. That his avant-garde eatery might never have become number one if not for a simple and spectacular dish

of old-fashioned tagliatelle. So that turned everything around? Totally. You are known as the maestro. Now, before they want to crucify me in the main piazza. It's not easy to get to. But for centuries, pilgrims have made their way to a place where faith, mystery, and miracles coexist. The story of these 11 Ethiopian churches, each carved from a single block of stone,

with no brick, no mortar, nor wood, is a creation story you'll need to see to believe. Good evening. I'm Scott Pelley. Welcome to 60 Minutes Presents. Tonight, a holiday feast for the senses. Sight, taste, and touch. We'll sample the delights of the delicious with a renowned Italian chef. We'll travel to ancient Ethiopian churches carved, it is believed, by the touch of angels. The first course of tonight's feast is something for the eyes, the art of Mark Bradford. Mark Bradford is widely considered one of the most important and influential artists in America today. As Anderson Cooper first reported this past spring,

Mark Bradford's art may look like paintings, but there's hardly any paint on them. as well as private collections, including Anderson Cooper's. Mark Bradford's art may look like paintings, but there's hardly any paint on them. They're made out of layers and layers of paper, which he tears, glues, power washes, and sands in a style all his own. When he began making art in his 30s, Bradford couldn't afford expensive paint, so he started experimenting with endpapers that are used for styling hair. He got the idea while working as a hairstylist in his mom's beauty shop in South Los Angeles. He was broke, struggling, and didn't sell his first painting until he was nearly 40. I heard a story that when you sold your first artwork in 2001, you called up your mom.

Do you remember what you said to her? I said, girl, I think I found a way out of the beauty shop. Girl, I think I found a way out of the beauty shop, yeah? Yeah, because I had no idea how I was going to stop being a hairstylist because that's really the only thing that I knew. I didn't have a problem with being a hairstylist, but that's all I knew. It's incredible to think that 2001 is when you first sold a work. Yeah. And now...

I still sell works. Yeah, you sure do. I sure do. This is the top. His first painting sold for $5,000. Now they can sell for more than $10 million. This new one was bought by the Broad Museum in Los Angeles. They have nine other Bradfords in their collection.

One, two, three. It's called Deep Blue. It's 12 feet high, 50 feet long, and took a full day to install. That's all right. That is all right. None of those colors you see are paint. It's all paper layered on canvas. It's abstract, but not entirely.

See those lines that form a grid? It's a street map of the Watts neighborhood in Los Angeles. The colored balls show where properties were damaged in 1965 after six days of violent civil unrest, protests over police brutality and racial inequality. We first saw the painting more than a year ago, and Bradford had just started working on it in his studio in South Los Angeles. He'd already made the map of Watts out of bathroom caulking. The following month, when we stopped by again, he'd laid down 14 layers of colored paper and covered it all up with a layer of black. So there's a map underneath here. Yes. Of Watts.

Uh-huh. All these little points are what was looted, what was destroyed. So I kind of start from a map, and then on top of it, I think I lay art history and my imagination. All three. Bradford uses household tools to make his paintings. He likes to buy everything at Home Depot. My motto is, if Home Depot didn't have it,

Mark Bradford didn't use it. That's your motto. To this day. Building up the layers of paper on the canvas is just the beginning of his process. He then starts to peel, cut, and sand them down, which can take months. It's like an archaeological dig. It is like an archaeological dig. It's like history. I'm creating my own archaeological or psychological digs. Sometimes when I'm digging on my own painting, I'm asking myself, well, exactly what are you digging for? Where are you, where do you want to go, child? Oh, see, look, look at that.

See, now see that? I like. A lot of people get an abstract painting and think it's squiggles, it's torn paper. I don't understand it. Yeah, that's true. But for me, those squiggles and torn paper gives me a space to kind of unpack things, like the Watts riots. I'm grappling with how I feel about that subject and that material. I do grapple with things. I grapple with things personally and, you know, racially and politically.

What does it mean to be me? Mark Bradford has been grappling with that question in his art for the last 18 years, from making paintings out of street posters like those offering predatory loans in low-income neighborhoods, to creating works that address HIV-AIDS, racism, and the complexity of American history. He's 58 years old now, and at 6'8", stands out in a crowd. He still lives in South Los Angeles, where he grew up. When he was 8, he says he began to get bullied by neighborhood kids. That was the first time I felt different. That was the first time I was aware of my sensitivity.

That's the first time someone said, oh, you're a sissy. I definitely knew that I had to learn to navigate in a more cautious way so that I could survive. I just never had a problem being me. So even though people, they were calling you a sissy, it didn't make you want to try to change yourself? Not really. No, not really. I just didn't want to get my ass whooped. He was raised by his mother, Janice Banks, who owned her own beauty salon. That's where Bradford would head every day after school. I knew that I had to find a way to get across the schoolyard. I knew that my mother was always going to be there once I got across the schoolyard. And maybe, maybe I was in the hair salon every day watching women get across the schoolyard. I would hear their stories. I would watch them go through. And I just thought, if they can do it, I most certainly can do it. Mark Bradford started

working in the salon as a teenager, eventually becoming a hairstylist. It was a safe place where he could be himself, but that feeling disappeared in 1981 when his friends began dying from AIDS. I knew a storm was coming. I knew that in the gut. I knew that. And people were just dying.

That's what it felt like to me at 18 years old. I just was thinking, how are we going to make it through? Did you think you would make it through? No. No, I didn't think I'd make it through. Thinking he didn't have a future, he didn't plan for one. But when he was nearly 30, he took art classes at a junior college, and he says it clicked. There was the reading and learning about different scholars and feminism and deconstructing modernism and all that. I says, oh, man, I'm really into this. I'm not exactly sure what it is, but it just, yeah. And you'd still work at the hair salon? Oh, every day.

And so you'd be studying while at the hair salon? Oh, absolutely. I'd put the book in their lap and say, go read that back to me. He won a scholarship to the California Institute of the Arts, but struggled to make money as an artist. When he was 39, he finally had a breakthrough. I was working on a head. Working on a head. Working on a head, working on a beauty salon. Yeah. Because I was still working in the hair salon. I told you that. I just didn't know that terminology. I was hooking it up. Late at night, I was tired as hell too. And just endpapers fell on the floor. And I looked down and I thought, oh, they're translucent. Oh,

oh, I could use these. Endpapers are small rectangular tissues used to make permanent waves in hair. Bradford began burning the paper's edges and lining them up into grids he glued onto bedsheets. I knew I was onto something. I knew this was bridging. This material came from a site outside of the paint store. I think early on I was trying to weave these two sides of who I was together, the art world and the sites that I had come from, the life that I had led. I didn't want to leave any of it behind. I didn't want to edit out anything.

Private collectors began snapping up his end paper paintings, and his career took off. He's now a celebrity in the art world. His gallery openings are star-studded events. How are you? At the latest one in Los Angeles, Beyonce and Jay-Z, who own several Bradfords, stopped in. The ten paintings in this exhibition sold out before the gallery doors opened. Look how nice this is.

Wow, it's gorgeous. Bradford and his partner, more than 20 years, Alan DeCastro, are committed to using contemporary art and their own money to revitalize the neighborhood Bradford grew up in. In 2014, they opened Art and Practice, with Eileen Harris Norden the first collector to buy Bradford's work. It's a non-profit complex of buildings that includes a gallery, lecture spaces, and his mother's old beauty salon. This is the last hair salon that my mom worked in

and then I took it over from her. It was in the 90s. It was called Foxy Hair. They turned Foxy Hair into a center for young adults transitioning out of foster care. I would run down the block in here and buy myself whatever I needed to put back on the hair. But we were surprised to learn that Mark Bradford still styles hair. He does it for some of his former clients from the beauty shop, who are also among his closest friends. When you look around, does his art make sense to you? It does. It's like a map of his face. I mean, I look at it, it's beautiful, but I don't really get it. Get it.

He gave me something from his studio a long time ago, and I put it in my garage. Yes, you did. Wow. I put it in my garage. This was before he got, like, popular, I guess. And, yeah, and it's all torn up. And this guy was like, you know, you have something like a Mona Lisa. I'm like, for real? Y'all wrong for that. I don't see it. You don't see it. I don't.

But I like how you give a little insight of like what's going on in our community. I know that much about your art, so that much I really like. Bradford's latest work continues to focus on difficult and controversial issues. This painting, which is prominently displayed in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is called 150 Portrait Tone and was made in response to the 2016 fatal police shooting of Philando Castile during a traffic stop in Minnesota. He was trying to get out his ID and his wallet out his pocket and he let the officer know. Castile's girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, live streamed the incident. Bradford was so haunted by her words, he made them into

this painting. Please don't tell me this, Lord. Please, Jesus, don't tell me that he's gone. It's really the conversation that his girlfriend is having. With multiple people, which I was fascinated by. Why were you fascinated by? How composed she was. She was having a conversation with her daughter in the back seat, with Philando, who was passing away, with God, with us, Facebook, and with the policemen, all simultaneously. It was visual and textual and heartbreaking and heroic and strong all at the same time. In another major new work, Bradford turned his gaze to the Civil War.

It's called Pickett's Charge, and it's a reimagining of a pivotal Union victory at the Battle of Gettysburg. It was commissioned by the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. Bradford used as his starting point blown-up photos of a 19th century panoramic painting of Pickett's Charge, a painting which offers a romanticized view of the Confederacy. He then added layers of paper and cords over it, then carefully gouged, shredded, and ripped it apart. They almost feel like lacerations, almost scarring. That's what those feel like. And a little bit like bullet wounds, like it really punctures. It's a 360 degree painting that raises many questions in Bradford's mind, particularly about how we look

at history. It's looking at it through a different lens. Yes, that's the feeling that I wanted you to have, that history was laying on top of it, gouging into it, erasing it, bits of it showing. It's kind of me kind of revising it. So is this a more accurate representation of history? I don't really believe history is ever fully accurate.

It's acknowledging that. It's acknowledging the gaps. Right. The things we don't know. So many people have come to see Pickett's Charge. The Hirshhorn has extended the exhibition for two more years. Bradford recently opened a show in London and is preparing new works for shows in Texas and Europe.

Do you worry about the vagaries of the art world? What is popular today, 20 years from now? Oh, no. No, no, no. I wouldn't have. No. I have never... I mean, art has value because people believe it has value. No, I think art has value because it has value. I'm not going to wait for somebody else to tell me my work has value. I certainly wasn't going to wait on people to tell me I had value.

I'd probably still be waiting. I just, it has value because I think it has value. And then if other people get on the value, you know, Mark Bradford value train, great. Sometimes historic events suck. But what shouldn't suck is learning about history. I do that through storytelling. History That Doesn't Suck is a chart-topping history-telling podcast chronicling the epic story of America, decade by decade.

Right now, I'm digging into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s, including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck, available on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Today, when chefs can be as famous as movie stars and their creations in the kitchen as admired as original works of art, there are few who rival the success and celebrity of Massimo Bottura. His restaurant, Osteria Francescana, has three Michelin stars, and as Leslie Stahl first reported last year, it ranked number one on the list of the world's 50 best restaurants. It's located in northern Italy in a city called Modena, where the great tenor

Luciano Pavarotti was born. When we went to Modena to meet Chef Bottura, we were struck by how operatic he is. Imagine, imagine, imagine, dream. You have to dream about food, okay? Do you dream about food? I always dream about food. I always dream. We first met Massimo Bottura shopping for food in Modena, the home of Italy's finest balsamic vinegar and parmesan cheese. He buys the freshest vegetables, like green tomatoes, that he likes to top off with 25-year-old balsamic vinegar. Are you ready? I can't wait.

Okay. It's an experience that is going to stay with you for the rest of your life. I'm telling you. This is a huge moment. It's a huge moment for you. The whole thing, just like that? Yeah, just one bite. Okay. And close your eyes, connect your mental palate, and understand.

Your perception, your receptors are talking to you right now. There are so many different things going on in my mouth. Yeah, it is, it is, it is. Complexity. And that's his signature as a chef. And what's he making? He's making risotto, toasting rice with orange juice. Dishes that are complex mixtures of unexpected flavors.

In his kitchen at Osteria Francescana, he oversees a staff of 35 as they build his beautiful avant-garde masterpieces that he says are inspired by contemporary art. His creations are like canvases, and he christens them. He calls this camouflage made of wild hair, juniper berries, and cocoa powder. Oh, that's spectacular. Some of his dishes are beautiful. Some are whimsical. And then there's his version of popular Italian cuisine. That's chicken cacciatore.

This is chicken cacciatore. Oh, my God. You wouldn't recognize most of his Italian dishes. This is the crunchy part of lasagna. Spaghetti with tomato. Spaghetti with parmigiano. Spaghetti with fresh herbs. Battura is one of the most successful chefs in the so-called deconstruction school,

where food is presented like abstract art. What do you call this dish? In three parts. I don't know. His culinary creations are rooted in the traditions of northern Italy and his hometown, Modena, an ancient city of narrow streets and grand piazzas, where they've been making parmesan cheese and balsamic vinegar the same way for centuries. It's where Batura's love of food began when he was just a little boy hiding under

the kitchen table. I remember my grandmother was rolling pasta. In the meantime, what I was doing, I was stealing the tortellini from under the table and eat the raw tortellini. That's how you were beginning to develop your palate, was from raw tortellini. Yeah, from a raw tortellini. That's how you were beginning to develop your palate, was from raw tortellini. Yeah, from a raw tortellini you can understand a lot. You can understand the amount of spices they use, the amount of parmigiano, the amount of ham, you know, those kind of things. Even as a little kid. Balance, balance. How old are you at that point? You're a kid. Yeah, like seven, six. And you're falling in love with food. In that moment, exactly.

He started cooking for his friends when he was in high school. But his father wanted him to become a lawyer in the family's lucrative fuel business. I have to show my dad he was wrong. Because he tried to convince me not to get into that business. Being a chef. Yeah. He didn't respect that as a serious profession. No, no, no. No, no, no.

He didn't. No more money from daddy. Nope. That was it. No, no, that was it. Cut you off. And you're saying to yourself, I have to show you. I don't want to say it.

Revenge is a very strong word. It's more like... Show that you were right. Show that I'm also right. But he wasn't right right away. When he and his American wife, Laura Gilmore, opened Osteria Francescana in 1995, amidst all that tradition in Modena, they were offering

Bottora's minimalist rendition of a bowl of tortellini, just six little pieces of pasta. Six little, tiny, and that was it. The biggest provocation of all. A tortellini is something, it's comfort food for Modenese. It's like a religion. If you don't believe in God, you believe in tortellini, but you don't want six. You want a nice, big, abundant bowl of tortellini with the hot broth. And he was serving this sort of room temperature broth gel, and the tortellini were there, and there were six of them, and the Modenese were like putting their hands, like, what did I come here for? Why am I here?

Food critics ask themselves the same question. A very important modernist food critic came and ate. The modernist food critic. The modernist food critic came and ate at our restaurant. Of course, the review was terrible. The review was like, please don't go there. Don't go there. Don't go there. And hardly anyone did.

His food was seen as a sacrilege in a country that reveres mothers and their home cooking. Did you ever say to yourself, okay, I'm going right back to the old Italian cooking. I can do it. I know how to do it. Never. No. No, you can't do it. I know how to do it. Never. No. No, you can't do that. But after six years of bad reviews and empty tables,

he gave in and introduced a handful of traditional Italian dishes, including an old-fashioned tagliatelle. And then a prominent national food critic happened by, ordered the tagliatelle, and wrote... But these are the the tagliatelle and wrote... But these are the best tagliatelle in the world. He said that? Yes. So that turned everything around?

Totally. You are known as the maestro. Yeah. Now, before they want to crucify me in the main piazza. Now they call me maestro. That's the difference. Some of the maestro's dishes are improvisations born out of accidents, like his, oops, I dropped the lemon tart.

That's a classic. The story begins when his pastry chef, Taka, was making a lemon tart. I saw Taka completely white. He dropped one of the two tarts in the plate, upside down, just like that. Oh, God. Taka was like ready to kill himself. And I said, Taka, Taka, no, please don't. Don't kill yourself. Don't, don't. Look at that. That lemon tart is so beautiful that we have to serve the second one exactly the first one. We did it. We rebuilt in a perfect way the imperfection. We smashed the other tart exactly as the first one.

I can't believe we did that. If I think now, I'm like, we were crazy. I was like totally out of mind. Fantastic. Oops, I dropped the lemon tart. It's Jackson Pollock on a plate. And it's one of the most popular dishes on a tasting menu of 12 courses that with wine can cost more than $500 a person.

They serve lunch and dinner five days a week, and it's always booked. Reservations open three months in advance and fill up in minutes. Are you prepared for the best salad of your life? He invited us to sample some of his other signature dishes in his well-stocked wine cellar. Caesar salad in bloom. Those are flowers? All flowers, edible flowers. All edible flowers. 27 elements in that dish. It takes two chefs to build a salad leaf by leaf, petal by petal. And for this dish, it takes a splash of seawater. This is seawater transformed into paper. You make paper out of seawater? Yes.

It may not look like it, but this is Botora's Filet of Soul, topped off with wisps of dehydrated seawater. He calls it Mediterranean combustion. How am I ever going to eat normal food again, ever? But you feel how light you feel? Very light. Yeah, there's... But totally delicious.

How long did it take you to create this one dish? Was it months? 32 years. Come on. 32 years of experience. Now 56, after all his hard work, Botura is riding high, sometimes on his customized

Ducati motorcycle. But a few years ago, he began to feel something was missing in his life, that serving fancy food to international foodies wasn't enough. So like other celebrity chefs, he began to think about helping the poor

by feeding them. This is late 2013. We had just sort of one year into having our third Michelin star that we had worked 20 years to get. And I'm thinking, now you want to start doing this? I thought it was a terrible idea. But she relented and helped him open a number of what he calls refitorios, kind of souped-up soup kitchens.

But he didn't want them to feel like down-and-out, stand-in-line cafeterias. So partnering with local charities, he created warm, inviting dining rooms in old abandoned theaters or unused space in churches where the working poor and homeless Italians and refugees from Africa sit side by side with volunteers who serve them three-course meals, like in high-quality restaurants. The food, donated by local grocery stores, would have been thrown out because it's slightly damaged or near its sell-by date. We are Italian, so we're going to make pasta. He's opened seven refatorios so far,

in London, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, and four in Italy, with more to come. Where did that inspiration come from? world production are wasted every year 1.3 billion tons of food is wasted every year you know think about one trillion of apples goes in the garbage. Think about how many, you know, apple pie you could create with those, with trillions of, you know, that's insane. The man who has for decades insisted on the oldest balsamic, the finest parmesan, the freshest tomatoes, now realizes their salvation in discarded leftovers. If cooked well, they can nourish the poor, as he says, by filling their stomachs and lifting their spirits.

Massimo Vottura, number one. And his as well. It's absolutely necessary to give back some of the lucky life you're living. So this is about giving back. It's what we need. We need dreams. If you don't dream and you don't dream big, you are few places in the Christian world where the mystery is deeper than in Lalabela. 800 years ago, an Ethiopian king ordered a new capital for Christians. At 8,000 feet on the central plateau of Ethiopia stand 11 churches, each carved from a single gigantic block of stone. No bricks, no mortar, no concrete, no lumber, just rock sculpted into architecture.

As we recently reported, not much is known about who built them or why. But the faithful of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church say there's no mystery, really. The churches of Lalabela were built by angels. The northern highlands of Ethiopia rose 31 million years ago when fissures in the earth flooded the Horn of Africa with lava a mile deep. On hillsides, you can still see columns of lava frozen in time. Iron made the basalt red, and gases trapped inside made the stone light, as light and pliable as air. Christians laid their mark on Ethiopia before the year 400.

They found the ancient stone welcomed the bite of a chisel. The churches were carved around the year 1200 by people called the Zagwe. Their king, Lalabela, is said to have traveled the 1600 miles to Jerusalem. Legend has it when he returned and Jerusalem fell to the Islamic conquest, Lalabela ordered a new home for Christianity. And he came back with an ambitious idea or vision of creating an African Jerusalem, a black Jerusalem, here in the highlands of Ethiopia. Faisal Gheorghez is an Ethiopian architect and historian who walked us through the Rock of Ages. Well, there are three groups of churches, and each group is interconnected within

itself. We're sitting in St. Mary's Church. Yes. How was it built? Well, it was built starting from outside. They formed the shape, and then they start digging or let's say excavating downwards. So they dug essentially a trench around the whole perimeter. Yes. Which left them with a giant cube of solid rock. Exactly. And then they carved their doors, and in they went? In they went.

Chipping inside largely in darkness, artists sculpted many rooms with no room for error. Archways, vaults, and columns imitate traditional construction, even though in solid rock there's no need to hold up the ceiling. The enduring mystery is why. Why did King Lalabella attempt the seemingly impossible when easier building techniques were known? As the story goes, he was helped by angels. Yes. Who worked on the project overnight. I think I would rather take this as a symbolic thing because...

Do you not have any experience working with angels in architecture? Well, I get inspiration from angels. The site of the 11 churches covers about 62 acres. It's divided by a stream King Lalabella christened the River Jordan. The largest church covers around 8,000 square feet. Each is about four stories tall. But their most astounding dimension cannot be measured. It is the length to which they summon adoration. This is considered to be a holy place.

That coming here as a devout Christian is a very strong sign of their belief. Some people travel hundreds of kilometers to get here on foot, on foot, and they have been doing it for several centuries. The churches are open for worship year-round, but we were there Christmas Eve, when nearly 200,000 pilgrims rose to heaven on a path descending into the earth. Many walked for days or weeks, fasting, robed in white, an ordeal that is rinsed from the disciples in the tradition of Jesus. Any Ethiopian over the age of 30 cannot forget the suffering of drought and war and a million people lost to starvation. And so, having known poverty in this life, they've invested their souls in the next.

Tewolda Yigzau told us, I believe God is here. I came with faith. Her neighbor, Gaitie Ababao, and his daughter told us they walked from their farms nearly a hundred miles away, a journey of three days. God can hear your prayers anywhere. Why did you feel you had to be here? So that God can see our devotion, she said, and our dedication. We were very tired, he said. We were falling and getting back up throughout the journey,

all to see the celebration here, and God will recognize our effort. The Christmas celebration Ethiopians call Gena compresses them shoulder to shoulder to fast and chant and praise all night till dawn brings Christmas Day. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church claims to be among the earliest capitals of Christianity, thanks to a mysterious figure of the Hebrew Bible. The faithful believe that the Queen of Sheba left Ethiopia, went to Jerusalem, where she met King Solomon. From that meeting came a son. And when the son was an adult, he returned to Ethiopia with 12,000 Israelites and the Ark of the Covenant,

containing the tablets with the Word of God, the Ten Commandments. And the Ark remains in Ethiopia, according to the priests of the word of God, the Ten Commandments. And the Ark remains in Ethiopia, according to the priests of the Orthodox Church. We met Tage Saleh Mazgabu, the head priest of Lalabela, at the Church of St. George, which was last to be built and judged to be the masterpiece. I met a woman on Christmas Day who had spent three days walking here. Who are these pilgrims? These are believers, he told us, not just three days, even three months sometimes. When there was no air travel or buses, people used to travel from various parts of the country for months to come here and celebrate with us. The celebration beats to the rhythm of ancient instruments. instruments, the cabero, double-headed drum, and a rattle called the sistrum, whose sound

was known in North Africa 3,000 years before Jesus. On Christmas Eve, we watched you and your priests lead the chant all night long. What are you saying in that chant? We tell the people that God became human and a human became God. Because of Christ, we went from being punished by God to being his children again. Christmas is the day that forgiveness was born. But while God forgives, time does not. After eight centuries, the basalt basilicas are weary of wind and water. What's absolutely clear is that something quite miraculous happened here.

Stephen Battle is an architect with the World Monuments Fund who told us Lalabella's miracle is being undermined because the rock is not rock solid. When you're building a conventional building, you go to a quarry and you'll have different grades of stone and you try and select the best stone and leave the bad stuff behind. When you're carving a church out of the mountainside, you don't have that luxury. And so typically in any one of the churches here, you get good stone, and a lot of it is good stone, but then you also get actually bad stone and actually very bad stone, which is really very soft indeed. And over time, if you touch it,

it actually crumbles. And this is one of the most sacred parts of Lalibela. We saw the good and the bad in the chamber where King Lalibela is laid to rest. This is one of the best preserved sculptures I've seen at Lalibela. Yes, this is particularly beautiful and they're also painted. Simon Warwick is a master stonemason, also with the World Monuments Fund, a U.S.-based charity that preserves some of humankind's great achievements. Warwick has repaired European cathedrals and Roman antiquities, but Lalabella is more complicated because of the sincere belief that angels worked this stone. Simon, you can't actually cut this stone in order to fit a new piece in, because the stone

you would be cutting is sacred. Yeah, this was one of the first big issues that I came across. If we ever had to drill a hole to strengthen it, to put in a pin, we had to discuss it with the priests. They collected the dust. There was a whole procedure around touching the fabric of the church. The priests collected the dust? Yes. Yes.

That was the issue when Warwick was asked to resurrect the cross in this window without disturbing the fragment that remained. So this cross wasn't here? It was completely gone, yes. It was a very, very thin piece of stone remaining. So I hollowed out the back of the cross shape that we were inserting so that it was fitting over the original stone a bit like a dentist. And so we were able to conserve this tiny bit of stone, which is, in stonemasonry terms, it's crazy. But you have to

do that in this kind of situation. There have been other crazy conservation ideas. A dozen years ago, five umbrellas were built to keep the heavens from pouring down. The local people call them gas station roofs. And I think it's a pretty apt way of describing them. So you can imagine we have this extraordinary site with some of the most beautiful buildings in the world with extraordinary, huge spiritual significance, and there's a bunch of gas station roofs that have been placed over the top of them. It's really not compatible. It's not appropriate. Unholy to behold, the roofs became a lesson in the law of unintended consequences.

The churches were too wet. Now they're too dry. For the first time in 900 years, they're not being rained on. Exactly right. And so the stone is contracting much more than it has ever done before. And what happens is this creates little failures on a micro level, and the stone starts to crumble. The roofs were meant to be temporary, and in a few years they must be recovered.

Stephen Battle prays they'll be removed altogether and replaced by intensive maintenance. To that end, the World Monuments Fund is teaching conservation to dozens of Lalabella's priests and laymen in the hope that a host can protect the heavenly, perhaps for centuries to come. How long can they last? Well, another 900 years if they're looked after properly. Oh, yes, we're beyond a shadow of a doubt, absolutely, if they're looked after correctly. Even beyond another millennia,

we're not likely to know with certainty the answer to why. Why attempt what must have seemed impossible? No answer was apparent until we chipped away at what we saw Christmas Day. In the Old Testament, Isaiah advises those who seek God to look to the rock from which you were cut and the quarry from which you were hewn. Whoever cut this rock, angels or man, understood that in the presence of a miracle, faith is never washed away. I'm Scott Pelley. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes. Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah.