60 Minutes - 8/2/2020: The Emerald Triangle, The Columbus Letters, Built by Angels

Episode Date: August 3, 2020

California's cannabis producers are not seeing the windfalls predicted, amid regulations and a robust black market that are cutting into legal pot profits. Sharyn Alfonsi reports. A letter written by Christopher Columbus, describing his discovery of the Americas, became the world's first best seller more than 500 years ago. As Jon Wetheim reports, the surviving copies are so rare and valuable, they're being stolen and replaced with forgeries. And Ethiopian pilgrims have been trekking to this mysterious holy site for centuries. Scott Pelley has the story on this week's "60 Minutes." 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

Why do fintechs like Float choose Visa? As a more trusted, more secure payments network, Visa provides scale, expertise, and innovative payment solutions. Learn more at visa.ca slash fintech. What's better than a well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue? A well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart shopper and delivered to your door. A well-marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool. on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart shopper and delivered to your door.

A well-marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool. Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Groceries that over-deliver. It's harvest season for California's $11 billion cash crop, marijuana. But to understand its problems, you have to get high. See all those shiny straight things? Those are all marijuana growers. There's so much marijuana being grown in the state that there is a massive surplus. We found a lot of it is being smuggled east to states where it's yet to be legalized.

A 300-pound load stopped in Missouri, 800 pounds in Idaho, 3,400 pounds in Texas. Did this all happen too fast? Oh, my goodness. Of course it did. Tonight, a history lesson turned detective story about what may be the first blockbuster news story ever published. Solving the mystery of the stolen Christopher Columbus letters, written more than 500 years ago by the explorer himself, announcing his discovery of the new world.

He actually made the globe a globe, and that's pretty much the most consequential news ever published, isn't it? 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. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. Hi there, I'm Ryan Reynolds, and I have a list of things I like to have on set.

It's just little things like two freshly cracked eggs scrambled with crispy hash brown, sausage crumble, and creamy chipotle sauce from Tim Hortons. From my rider to Tim's menu, try my new scrambled eggs loaded breakfast box. It's getting close to harvest season for one of California's largest cash crops, marijuana. Valued at more than 11 billion dollars, it's worth more than the state's grape and almond industries combined. California grows more pot than any place in the country. Nearly four years ago, voters approved a ballot measure called Prop 64 in California. It made marijuana legal for anyone over the age of 21. Advocates said a regulated pot industry would push out the black market and generate more than a half billion dollars a year for the state. As we first reported in October, it's not quite worked out that way.

We spent a week in a region of California that should be rolling in profits, the Emerald Triangle. What Napa is to wine, the triangle is to weed. Its Mediterranean climate and rich soil are famous for producing some of the highest quality marijuana in the world. This might look like a Home Depot, but it's a pot processing plant, and every one of those buckets is full of marijuana. At the height of production, this room is the biggest legal pot stash in the country. How much cannabis is in this room? There's several thousand pounds. Several thousand pounds.

Yes, tens of thousands, actually. Mikey Steinmetz runs the Flo Cana factory. It packages weed from legal, state-regulated farms in the Emerald Triangle to be shipped and sold around California to licensed stores. There is nothing like this anywhere else in the pot industry. This is like Willy Wonka stuff, right? Yeah, we've been called that before, the Willy Wonka of weed. So you have to create and come up with all this stuff?

Everything, everything. And that's what the hardest part is, that the technology and innovation is just starting to enter the space. Forget those stereotypes about stoners. Some of his workers came from Apple and Google. They precisely weigh joints, inspect buds like gems, and package it to look more like high-end cosmetics than cannabis. Oh, wow.

Is it different? Is it pineapple wonder? Yeah. Steinmetz raised $175 million in just one year to get this off the ground. But despite all that, all along the supply chain, we found it's been far from a gold rush. Is it a windfall? Are you all of a sudden rich? Are you making tons of profit? No. Candidly, the regulated market has been a fraction of what everybody expected it to be. Why?

The retail market has been very slow to roll out. That's a nice one for sure. The slow rollout is because of the strict limits on opening pot shops in California. Although Prop 64 legalized marijuana across the state, it gave towns and cities the power to decide if pot businesses can open locally. Eighty percent said not in my town. So we have less retailers than we do in Oregon, for example, in a state that has orders of magnitude larger.

Say that again. You have less retailers. There's less retailers in California than there are in the state of Oregon. And remember, California growers can only legally sell their marijuana in California. And licensed stores like this one in the Emerald Triangle are rare. Give me a sense of kind of who the customers are who are walking in right now. Our demographic is over 60. That is... Really?

Yes. Yeah, we get a... Are they old hippies or are they grandparents with joint pain? I would say they're both. Yeah. But there's not enough stores like this that sell marijuana legally, and there's way too much of it being grown. California grows 11 million more pounds than it can consume a year.

Prices have crashed. It made things even more difficult for legal businesses like Flo Cana. There's an insane surplus of marijuana. For sure. Is it possible that there are too many growers, that we're producing too much weed in California? Yeah, I mean, historically, California has been the supply of the nation, right? It's simply just the numbers don't add up.

It's also not adding up for licensed pot farmers in the Emerald Triangle. We drove up what locals call the million-dollar highway into the heart of pot country. For decades, pot farmers have hauled their weed on this winding, remote road, a lot of it grown on family farms like Casey O'Neill's. They've been here since the 70s. Welcome to the farm. Thank you so much. He has just 45 marijuana plants.

He calls them his ladies, and they're tucked between his rows of vegetables. All the cannabis in this row is Strawberry Valley. O'Neill, who spent time in jail for cultivating marijuana before it was legal, was one of the first to get a license after Prop 64 passed. I grow cannabis because I really love it. I like to consume it. I like to be around it.

It's something that provides my being and consciousness with tremendous love and support. But his being and consciousness is getting strangled by red tape and a laundry list of requirements that don't make sense to growers, like weighing marijuana leaves, which is the part of the plant you don't smoke and can't get you high. I must take all of the leaf that comes off the plant, I must weigh it, I must record the weight, and I must put it in a locked compost facility. So it's just like, Big Brother has some funny ideas.

Because what's the worry with the leaves? If you can't smoke the leaves, why does it matter? Exactly. Then there's the cost of operating legally. A major reason, O'Neill says, farmers he knows have decided to keep growing and selling marijuana illegally. For most people out here, the opportunity to participate does not exist. The barriers to entry are too high.

The costs are too high. The skill sets are too low. The flip side of it is people are not going to jail for cannabis. And what's the cost to you? So when you factor in consulting fees, you know, I just did a back of the napkin calculation and over the last three, four years, I'm well over $50,000 into it. $50,000 for what, permits? For permits, for consulting, $2,500 a year for the waterboard discharge permit. It's $750 a year for the pond permit. It's $1,350 application fee to the county, plus another $675 when they actually give

you the permit annually. For a farm this size? For a tiny, for the smallest farm that there is. And that's one of the problems is that... So what does that do to your profits? What profits? You're not making any money right now? No. Really? Absolutely not. So where's the money being made in California? It turns out in the very place legalization was supposed to destroy, the black market, which often operates out of storefronts like this and strip malls around the state. Those unlicensed shops don't have to pay for state and local permits and can sell marijuana much cheaper because they don't charge customers marijuana taxes, which can reach as high as 45 percent. So it's cheaper and easier to buy pot on the

black market, which is three times larger than the legal one. Unlike other industries, we have this kind of in the shadows, unspoken about competitor. Right. And so it's like it's not like California is fully raging, fully legal. Really, we're building to a fully regulated state, but we're certainly not there yet. To see the roots of the black market in the Emerald Triangle, it helps to get high. Our guide was Mendocino County Sheriff Tom Allman.

He's been chasing marijuana growers for 35 years. Wow, this is a big operation. Oh, my goodness, this guy is going to make millions of dollars. Allman told us those white canopies belong to illegal marijuana growers undercutting California's legal pot industry. See all those shiny straight things? Those are marijuana growers. How do you know they're not like tomatoes? Because they're hidden in the woods. Look right here. I know those are not tomatoes, okay?

There's 12 of them right there. I can guarantee you those are not tomatoes. We were surprised they weren't camouflaged. Allman explained since Prop 64 and the legalization of marijuana, the black market suppliers try to blend in with legal pot farmers, sometimes on the same property. So the backers of Prop 64 said three things, right? Okay. First, they said, we're going to raise a half billion dollars in tax revenue.

Has that happened? No. They said it's going to eliminate the black market. Has that happened? The black market has greatly increased. Has increased. Absolutely. And they said that this would now allow police officers like you to focus on other things. I'm looking forward to that day. Right now, his deputies are busy. There's so much illegal weed in areas that are so remote, they have to haul it away by helicopter. Allman says he only has the manpower

to get rid of about 10 percent of it. So what happens to the rest? We learned much of it is being smuggled east to the 39 states where pot is still illegal and prices are three times higher than in California. We've heard these reports from state police that say they're seeing larger shipments of marijuana moving east from California. Have you heard about this? So probably once a week, we get a call. It's usually some trooper back east, you know, at 3 in the morning who stopped a car for not having a taillight. He says, you won't believe it, you know, we got 35 or 40 pounds. That's on the low end.

Throughout the year, we spoke to highway patrols across the center of the country. They shared photos of hundreds of pounds of pot they've intercepted. This 300-pound load was in Missouri. This trailer in Idaho carried 800 pounds, and 3,400 pounds were found in this hall in Texas. Since Prop 64 was implemented, we were told by highway patrols in six states that they've seized up to three times more pot on their roads. Did this all happen too fast? Oh my goodness, of course it did. It happened way too fast. For the black market, it's been a gold rush. I'm not saying that anybody at the organizers of Prop 64 intended this to happen the way it happened. You know, they just wanted to decriminalize marijuana.

But people have taken advantage. Allman explained that Californians have little appetite to prosecute marijuana crimes. So he's had to get creative to go after the black market. If I took someone in front of a jury for growing a thousand plants illegally, no permits, no anything, I am telling you there is no way in hell I'm going to get a conviction on cultivation of marijuana. Marijuana on its face is part of our social fabric. But if that same grower was stealing water and using pesticides and rodenticides and taking water from the river, that jury's going to hang him. Most of you already know where the target is. It's about 20 miles north of here.

To see that strategy at work, we went on a marijuana raid where agents from the Department of Fish and Wildlife were leading the way. They took us down a dusty, bumpy road deep in the Emerald Triangle. Their agents had been hiding in a forest for days, staking out an illegal grow. With their guns out, they went in. You have the right to remain silent and refuse to answer any questions. As cops questioned two workers, others went row by row chopping down a thousand plants. remain silent and refuse to answer any questions. As cops questioned two workers, others went row by row chopping down a thousand plants. Scientists checked for illegal pesticides and documented how water was being stolen from a creek. Those violations, which could result in

fines up to $40,000 a day, may turn out to be the most effective weapon against black market growers. Who would have thought that when we write a search warrant and we go out and serve it, we would bring a biologist with us? Now it's as important to us as bringing a gun. Illegal grows now are manifesting. They're getting bigger. They're becoming more stubborn, more acute. California Governor Gavin Newsom, who was a strong supporter of Prop 64, has said it could take seven years to get past the growing pains and stomp out the black market. He's called in the National Guard to help by ordering units that were assisting the border patrol near Mexico to move north to the Emerald Triangle, where Casey O'Neill grows his pot.

So what happens if the National Guard shows up, and here come the helicopters descending on the hills of the Emerald Triangle? It's the same as it ever was. What happens six months later? What happens the day after they leave? People replant. Casey O'Neill may be right. Six weeks after that raid we went on, cops went back to the exact spot and found 1,100 brand new marijuana plants.

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. In 1492, Christopher Columbus, of course, sailed the ocean blue. And on his journey home, he wrote a letter to his patrons, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabel of Spain, describing his discovery of the new world and, in effect, asking for more money to make another trip. Columbus's voyage marked one of the great plot points in history.

Upon his return, his letter was printed and distributed throughout Europe, making for blockbuster news. Columbus's original handwritten letter, penned on the high seas, no longer exists. But some of the printed copies do. As we first reported last year, most are housed in prestigious libraries, and for centuries, that's where they've remained. That is until about 10 years ago, when authorities discovered some of these treasures had been stolen and replaced with forgeries.

So began a modern kind of transatlantic quest, as investigators in the U.S. and Europe worked to recover Columbus's missing missives and solve this most unusual international mystery. If there is one library in the world you'd think would be impervious to theft, this would be it. The Vatican Library in Rome houses a vast and unrivaled collection of historic treasures. It is the Pope's library, home to manuscripts going back nearly 2,000 years. The library is closed to the public back nearly 2,000 years. The library is closed to the public.

It's a place for scholars only. But Ambrogio Piazzoni, the vice-prefect, invited us inside. It was here in 2011 that Vatican officials first discovered that one of their prized items, a Columbus letter, had somehow been stolen and replaced with a fake. How do you think this happened? Look, I do not know. I have no idea how and when it may have happened. Certainly it was an operation carried out as a proper theft, but I do not know when or how. He is in good company. At the center of this mystery, this eight-page letter,

written at sea by Christopher Columbus more than 500 years ago. In it, he describes his first impressions of the New World, a wonderland, he writes, filled with rivers, gold, and timid natives. When Columbus's letter arrived at the royal court in Spain in 1493, it was promptly sent to Rome, where it was translated into Latin and printed, spreading the news of his extraordinary expedition. So this was big news. Columbus makes this voyage, and suddenly this is being disseminated. This is some of the biggest news ever. Jay Dillon is a rare book dealer in New Jersey. He ranks the Columbus letter as one of the most important documents ever printed.

This was one of the first bestsellers. It's probably the first contemporary account of anything to be published across Europe. Today, only about 30 copies of this Columbus letter still exist. Each one is now worth something in the low seven figures. More than a million dollars. More than a million, but probably less than four or five million. It was while researching Columbus letters on his home computer back in 2011 that Jay Dillon first noticed something amiss. The National Library of Catalonia in Barcelona had posted photos of their Columbus letter online. What struck Dillon is odd.

It looked exactly like a Columbus letter that he had seen for sale a year earlier, right down to the same smudge marks in the margins. You're telling yourself what at this point? I'm telling myself that one of them has to be a forgery. Why is that? Because you can't have two books with the same random brown spots in the margins. It's just impossible. What confirmed your suspicions were these matching marks from

these texts that were 500 years old. That's right. That would not happen. That cannot happen. Jay suspected the library's letter had been stolen and put up for sale, which meant whatever was currently in their collection was a fake. It was so remarkable, I couldn't believe it at first. And I made it my business from that moment on to look at every original I could. And so it was that J. Dillon became an unlikely detective. Following his instincts, he visited libraries in Rome and Florence and took a look at their Columbus letters. To my utter astonishment, a Columbus letter in the Vatican Library was a forgery. And then I went to the Biblioteca Riccardiana in Florence and damned if the same thing doesn't happen again.

Their Columbus letters are fake too. Afraid that notifying the libraries might alert the culprit, he decided instead to take his information to the Department of Justice. It seemed like it was almost out of a Hollywood movie script. Homeland Security Special Agent Mark Alexa led the investigation, along with Assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of Delaware, Jamie McCall. Similar reaction. I thought it was a John Grisham novel, that we had some people in Europe stealing these treasures of the world and replacing them with high-quality forgeries.

You say Hollywood script, you say John Grisham. Were you skeptical? Of course. We have to confirm what our tipster was providing us. They turn to Paul Nita, one of the world's foremost experts on 15th century printing. He runs the Shide Library at Princeton University, home to one of the most valuable private collections of books on earth. And now it was Needham's turn to travel to Europe to examine the letters. In each case, he determined the originals had indeed been removed and replaced with photographic facsimiles printed on centuries-old paper. The Columbus letter being a highly collected book, it's just the perfect combination, both very small and very valuable.

Their value per leaf of paper is higher than for any other printed book. You're saying this is the perfect item to forge. It's the perfect item to forge. It's the perfect item to forge. And there's a market for it. There's always been a market for it. This turned into a transatlantic collaboration, a legacy, you might say, of Christopher Columbus. We engage quickly with the Carabinieri.

Enter Giovanni Prisco, captain of the Carabinieri Police's cultural heritage squad based in Rome. His unit investigates property theft from private homes, churches, and libraries. In Italy, it is a crime market second only to that of illegal drug and weapon sales. We're in this country with so many artifacts, with so many churches. You must be very busy. Yes, we are very, very busy, of course.

One of the most valuable art collections in Europe isn't housed in a museum visited by millions of tourists, but in this warehouse in the back of his police station. It's basically an evidence locker for stolen artifacts. This is all art that you've seized. Yes, there are some archaeological items, some fake and contemporary arts, and some antiquist paintings. What is this? Yes, like that one. This is Caravaggio, it's coming from the school of Caravaggio. Caravaggio? Yes, and it's a painting stolen

at the end of 1990, and it was from a private house, it was discovered in the north of 1990, and was from a private house, was discovered in the north of Italy. What does a Caravaggio go for these days? It's a million of dollars, of course. Millions of dollars. Yes, it's a great paint, it's quite big, and it's coming from my Caravaggio hands. But wait, there's more.

Amphoras, sculptures, and dozens of masterpieces. An original Tiepolo, and this painting by Peter Paul Rubens. Oh, wow. He's a noble donna. This is a Rubens. Yes, it's a real Rubens. It's not a fake. Captain Prisco says one of their biggest challenges these days is protecting Italy's rare books.

The country has more than 18,000 libraries. Why is it so difficult to protect books from theft? Because books, some of them are really small. It's not difficult to put under your arm or in your jacket. While book thefts are often committed by insiders, in the case of the Columbus letters, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jamie McCall suspects there may have been more than one person involved. It requires access. It requires the ability to create high-quality forgeries and then the ability to know where and how to sell these Columbus letters on the private market.

One name that keeps coming up is Massimo De Caro. Familiar name to you guys? Yes. Massimo De Caro was prosecuted by the Italian authorities for pilfering thousands of rare books, and he was involved in the sale of at least one of the Columbus letters at issue. This is someone who's been involved in these kinds of crimes before? Yes, correct. Fair to characterize him as a person of interest? He is a subject in the investigation. The Columbus letters themselves may be hard to track down, but this subject in the investigation is not exactly in hiding. Massimo De Caro, a notorious Italian book thief, just finished serving a seven-year sentence for stealing thousands of ancient books and manuscripts from Italian libraries and selling them overseas.

To our surprise, he agreed to meet with us at his home in Orvieto, a hill town an hour's drive north of Rome. To say that he professes his innocence would be an act of considerable understatement. The police say you're a subject in this investigation. Does that concern you? You know, first of all, the police in Italy, regarding books, are the worst, OK? They even don't know how is made one book. I love Italy too much to say which level they are, OK? But it doesn't bother you that you're a person of interest?

No, no, I mean, I would like to help. You want to help? Yeah, I would like to help. If I work on it, I'm sure I can solve it. You think you're smarter than the police? Let's say that I'm more expert than them. In this field? In this field, yes.

De Caro is not just a convicted thief. He's also an accomplished forger. He spent years making a fake Galileo book, which fooled the experts and sold for almost a half million dollars. He showed us another Galileo reproduction he made. You can see the quality of the paper. I used antique paper. You did this? This is your handiwork? Yes, at all, and I'm very proud about this. You're very proud of this? Yes. If this book were original, what would this fetch on the market? What would someone pay for this?

$300,000, at least. De Caro admits he sold two Columbus letters, which he says he bought legitimately from an anonymous collector. But he denies he ever made a fake Columbus letter. Why? For one thing, he says, it's too easy. You could have reproduced one of these Columbus letters. Oh, if I try, I'm sure I can create the best Columbus letter. If I create a Columbus letter,

then we can show this Columbus letter to all the experts that you want, and I'm sure I can bet that nobody recognizes it is a fake. You think you could fool them? Yes. Eight years into the joint U.S.-Italian investigation, no arrests have been made in the case, but three stolen Columbus letters have been recovered. No easy task as they were sold in private sales to wealthy collectors who, investigators say, weren't aware the letters had been stolen. How did you start tracking down the originals? We relied heavily on Dr. Needham. He had a great roadmap of transactions and who was possessing and selling these Columbus letters throughout the world.

They were found in the most surprising places. The letter stolen from the Ricardiana Library in Florence turned up in, get this, the U.S. Library of Congress, alongside national treasures like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. They were shocked. They were stunned, as you can imagine. The letter had been donated to the Library of Congress in 2004 by one of their major donors. As for the Vatican's stolen Columbus letter, it was traced to a wealthy Atlanta collector who had bought it in 2004 for almost $1 million. Last year, Ambrosio Piazzoni, vice-prefect of the Vatican Library, was on hand when it was returned to its rightful home. When the Columbus letter was returned to the Vatican, was the Pope informed about that?

Yes, he was informed. He was very pleased with this return. When you're seeing the successful return of this stolen Vatican Library document, is that a miracle? I use the word miracle for other things. But let's say that this was a very beautiful thing and we're happy that it happened. For Jay Dillon, the rare book dealer who stumbled upon the first clue in this mystery,

it's been a satisfying quest about more than simply stolen letters. This is the very stuff of history. Columbus, for all his achievements and all his faults, did something that nobody had ever done before. He actually made the globe a globe. And that's pretty much the most consequential news ever published, isn't it? After our story aired, investigators recovered a fourth stolen Columbus letter,

which had been missing for more than 30 years. It was found in the hands of an unidentified private collector and returned to the National Library in Venice. If faith is a mystery, there are few places in the Christian world where the mystery is deeper than in Lalabela. Eight hundred 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 first reported last year, 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 1,600 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 Genna 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 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. 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. Obviously, we worked on the roof first. 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? 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 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.