Fremona (, ''fəremona'') was a town in

Tigray Region The Tigray Region (or simply Tigray; officially the Tigray National Regional State) is the northernmost Regions of Ethiopia, regional state in Ethiopia. The Tigray Region is the homeland of the Tigrayan, Irob people, Irob and Kunama people. I ...

Ethiopia Ethiopia, officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a landlocked country located in the Horn of Africa region of East Africa. It shares borders with Eritrea to the north, Djibouti to the northeast, Somalia to the east, Ken ...

. It was about a mile in circumference and was flanked with towers. The town served as the base of the

Roman Catholic The Catholic Church (), also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the largest Christian church, with 1.27 to 1.41 billion baptized Catholics worldwide as of 2025. It is among the world's oldest and largest international institut ...

missionaries to Ethiopia during the 16th and 17th centuries. Bernhard Lindahl identifies Fremona with the modern settlement of Endiet Nebersh, located 10 kilometers from

Adwa Adwa (; ; also spelled Adowa or Aduwa) is a town and separate woreda in Tigray Region, Ethiopia. It is best known as the community closest to the site of the 1896 Battle of Adwa, in which Ethiopian soldiers defeated Italian troops, thus being ...

History

Fremona was originally called "Maigoga" (''mai'', Tigrinya "water," and ''guagua'', "noisy") because of the two rocky streams that ran through the community. The origin of the name is uncertain but it is very old, appearing on Aksumite inscriptions; it was not renamed by the

Jesuit The Society of Jesus (; abbreviation: S.J. or SJ), also known as the Jesuit Order or the Jesuits ( ; ), is a religious order (Catholic), religious order of clerics regular of pontifical right for men in the Catholic Church headquartered in Rom ...

missionaries. It was there that bishop Andrés de Oviedo died and was buried in 1577, and his tomb became a shrine to the local Catholics. When the Jesuit Manuel de Almeida visited Fremona in 1624, he found that it had been improved with "seven or eight bastions with high curtain walls, two courtyards, one of which adjoins the houses, where a good stone tank has been made, and another were a beautiful church was now being built of stone and lime." He adds that due to the rarity of firearms in Ethiopia at the time, "with twenty or thirty muskets, a small cannon and the sons of the Portuguese manning them, twas held in Ethiopia to be a unique and impregnable place." It was here that the Catholic priests, patriarch and bishop were exiled, after Emperor

Fasilides Fasilides ( Ge'ez: ፋሲለደስ; ''Fāsīladas''; 20 November 1603 – 18 October 1667), also known as Fasil, Basilide, or Basilides (as in the works of Edward Gibbon), was Emperor of Ethiopia from 1632 to his death on 18 October 1667, and a me ...

condemned Catholicism and restored to official status the traditional beliefs of the

Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church () is the largest of the Oriental Orthodox Churches. One of the few Christian churches in Africa originating before European colonization of the continent, the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church dates bac ...

in 1634. At the time,

Jerónimo Lobo Jerónimo Lobo (1595 – 29 January 1678) was a Portuguese Jesuit missionary. He took part in the unsuccessful efforts to convert Ethiopia from the native Ethiopian church to Roman Catholicism until the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1643. Afterw ...

states that the town had 400 inhabitants. After the Catholic missionaries were banished from Ethiopia, Fremona was eventually abandoned; the details are unknown. The Ethiopian historian Richard Pankhurst cites a taxation report from 1697 that mentions Fremona under its old name Maigoga.Richard K.P. Pankhurst, ''History of vol. 1 Ethiopian Towns: From the Middle Ages to the Early Nineteenth Century'' (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1982), p. 71. Yet when Henry Salt travelled through the area in the 1800s, he reported that he was unable to find anyone who recognized the name.

References

Former populated places in Ethiopia 17th century in Ethiopia Populated places in the Tigray Region {{Tigray-geo-stub