A medieval church in Sudan bigger than the White House may have been a lost cathedral

Beneath the sand of Old Dongola, on the Nile in northern Sudan, a Polish-Sudanese team has reached the original floor of a medieval church estimated at 47 meters wide and 57 meters long, standing perhaps 21 meters tall. Excavation director Artur Obłuski of the University of Warsaw says the building is larger than the White House in Washington, and that his team plans to dig it out.

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Old Dongola was the capital of the Christian kingdom of Makuria, and the structure, known as the Great Church of Jesus, may be the long-sought seat of its archbishop. The evidence is still circumstantial, and much of the building remains underground.

Measuring the Great Church against the White House

The dimensions come from Arkeonews’ account of the latest season and are labelled estimates, not surveyed measurements. A rectangle of 47 by 57 meters covers about 2,680 square meters, or roughly 28,800 square feet, before counting height. The White House Historical Association puts the floor area of the mansion’s ground, state and residence levels at approximately 55,000 square feet, excluding the West and East Wings. The two numbers measure different things, so Obłuski’s remark reads best as a statement about overall mass: a footprint of mansion scale, topped by walls that may have risen to 21 meters. Beside the staircase, walls still stand about 11 meters high, according to Archaeology News Online Magazine.

Earlier figures were smaller. The Smithsonian’s coverage of the 2021 find described a structure about 85 feet wide, roughly the height of a three-story building, which shows how provisional the measurements remain until deeper digging fixes the true layout.

The staircase, the buttresses and the first look at the floor

The latest season focused on the entrance. Excavators uncovered monumental stairs leading into the church and large buttresses built to brace the apse. The stairs let them descend to a section of the original flooring for the first time, a milestone because the building was detected by remote sensing in 2021 and had mostly been studied from outside. The kingdom behind the church was no minor power: Makuria was a major power from the 6th to the 14th centuries, and Obłuski has described it as a largely forgotten fairy-tale realm that at its peak matched Spain and France combined in size. Beside the main church, an added structure holds a second, smaller church on an upper floor, where paint survives only to about one meter up the walls.

Fragments of painted plaster from the fill now crowd six large shelving units in the expedition’s storage, though few decorations remain in place on the walls. A church on the north side of the Great Church, dated to the 13th century and linked to King David of Makuria, was found in 2023 and kept far more of its paintings, giving the team a comparison for the damaged plaster in the bigger building.

Greek odes and the prayer of Hannah

Epigraphist Agata Deptuła identified Greek inscriptions on plaster fragments from the smaller church. Letters about half a centimeter tall carry texts she links to Old Testament hymns and prayers, among them part of the prayer of Hannah, the mother of the prophet Samuel. Psalms were already known from the region, but odes of this type are new for Old Dongola. The University of Warsaw center’s report on the discoveries is the primary record of the season. Hymns copied or painted at this scale suggest a congregation, and clergy, able to read Greek in a Nubian capital far from the Byzantine heartland.

A cathedral outside the textbook location

Scholars had long treated a church outside the city walls as the cathedral of Old Dongola. A large church inside the walled center, with a domed tomb beside the apse that researchers have said resembles the archbishop’s tomb at Faras, points elsewhere, according to the Smithsonian’s report on the 2021 discovery. Obłuski has compared the building’s possible influence on Nubian architecture to that of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople.

The cathedral label stays a hypothesis. Arkeonews reports that the founding date, the church’s place in the religious hierarchy and its relationship to other large churches all need more evidence, and that fixing its true size and layout will take deeper excavation and more funding. Work is paid for by Poland’s National Science Centre, with conservation help from the Warsaw University of Technology, and it sits inside the European Research Council project Afropolis Tungul.

Conservation has been a race against the weather. Old Dongola took its worst flood since 1988 in autumn 2024, which damaged some of the roofing that shelters the ruins, and repairs came before new digging began. The project reaches beyond the dig itself. Archaeology News Online Magazine reports that a solar installation funded by Poland’s Polish Aid program now powers pumps serving about 10,000 people, and that residents have formed an association to help protect the site. Whether the church can be fully uncovered, and whether the money arrives to do it, will decide if a 57-meter building on the Nile ever gets a firm date and a firm label.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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