She stretches goat skin across wooden frames and scrapes it clean with steel blades, enduring the smell, the flies and the physical strain required to produce biranna, parchment made from animal skin using traditional Ethiopian techniques. Some of Ethiopia’s oldest surviving manuscripts were written on it.
Mahlet Muleta does work few young people attempt. In workshops across the country, the craft has long been dominated by older men, and some doubted she could handle the labor or refused to teach her.
Today, she is among the few young artisans preserving a tradition that has carried holy texts for more than 1,000 years in Ethiopia.
Mahlet’s journey began more than a decade ago with a simple act of kindness that led her to a craft devoted to protecting sacred texts.
As a 10th grade student, she regularly delivered food to people in need around Hana Mariam Church at her mother’s urging.
“I remember seeing an elderly priest with worn and damaged prayer books,” Mahlet recalls. “Those books immediately caught my attention.”
The pages were thick and luminous, unlike anything she had seen. She asked how they were made.
The answer introduced her to biranna, parchment prepared from goat skin using techniques passed down through generations.
During family holidays, Mahlet began experimenting with goat skins, trying to replicate what she had learned about biranna.
She often failed at first before beginning to understand the rhythm and patience the craft demanded. Her curiosity soon turned into determination.
The search for mastery took her across Ethiopia.
At Dima Giyorgis Monastery in Bahir Dar, she asked to be trained. The artisan there refused.
“I was 17 and a woman,” she recalls. “They thought I was a spy coming to steal intelligence or textbooks,” she adds with a smile.
Refusing to give up, she traveled to Amda Bet in Gondar, a historic city in northern Ethiopia, where she observed artisans at work.
Her search for guidance eventually led her to Addis Ababa, where she connected with Kirubel, founder of Hammer Birhan, a parchment-making workshop, who showed her the full process from soaking the hide to final polishing.
“That increased my confidence,” she says. “It enabled me to fully commit myself to the preparation of biranna.”
The work is exacting and physically demanding. Goat skin is considered the strongest and most durable material.
The hide is soaked in water, stretched across a wooden frame and scraped with a curved blade known as a meselecha. It dries in the sun before being smoothed with an L-shaped blade called a fas.
The process can take three days with fresh skins and up to eight with older hides.
The smell lingers in the air. Houseflies gather quickly, and the labor strains the back and arms.
“This work is physically demanding even for very strong people,” said Merigeta Zemelak Amare, a religious manuscript writer at Debre Libanos Monastery and a buyer of Mahlet’s biranna for the past three years.
“When I first heard of her, I doubted she prepared it herself. Then I saw her go through the entire process,” he told Bantu Gazette.
For the first two years, Mahlet did not sell a single piece. She bought goat skins with her own savings and focused on reproducing religious manuscripts held by the elderly priest who first inspired her.
“It was not philanthropy,” she said. “It was my vision of preserving religious manuscripts that are pillars of my religion.”
For centuries, biranna has preserved Ethiopia’s sacred manuscripts, a legacy Mahlet is now helping sustain. Some of these Orthodox manuscripts date back more than 1,000 years.
Some were buried for centuries to protect them from invasion. Their survival depended on the durability of parchment.
“If it were not for biranna, it would not have been possible to keep those books alive,” Merigeta Zemelak said.
Inside Mahlet’s workshop, the work has also created opportunity.
Yabsira Zenebe, 23, joined her three years ago at a turning point.
“I was attending college and was about to quit because of a lack of finances,” Yabsira says. “As a last resort, I met her and got the job. That changed my life.”
Beyond income, she describes a deeper reward.
“These papers are made for holy textbooks and musical instruments like the begena used to praise God,” she says. “Being part of that chain gives me spiritual satisfaction.”
“We are more like sisters,” she said, smiling as she spoke of Mahlet.
The physical cost remains real.
Mahlet speaks openly about weight loss, lower back pain and respiratory strain.
Finding workers willing to stay is difficult. Securing workspace can be a challenge because of the smell.
Still, she remains focused.
“When your main drive is the mission, anything is possible,” she said. “Challenges are not even taken into account.”
Her long-term vision stretches back centuries.
She wants to recreate what is believed to be Ethiopia’s first church library, founded in the 13th century at Hayq by the monk Abba Iyyesus Mo’a, born in 1206.
The monk gathered manuscripts from across the country, had them copied and trained hundreds of disciples, including Abune Tekle Haymanot of Debre Libanos. A Four Gospels manuscript he donated is still preserved at Hayq.
Near Debre Libanos Monastery, Mahlet has already purchased a 200-square-meter plot of land for the project.
She hopes to replicate sacred texts and gather volunteers to rewrite manuscripts that hold generations of knowledge.
“I have seen these textbooks with my own eyes,” she said quietly. “But they cannot simply be publicized. Some people would try to steal and sell them.”
The texts survived because they were written on biranna.
The future of that material now depends on a small number of artisans, including a young woman who refused to accept that she did not belong in the trade.
As the world celebrates International Women’s Day on March 8, Mahlet stands in a lineage that stretches across centuries.
She has claimed space in a male-dominated craft, invested her own resources and chosen preservation over profit.
Merigeta Zemelak struggles to summarize her impact.
“I have no words to explain her magnificent work,” he said.
In her workshop, goat skin continues to soak in water. Blades move steadily across stretched hides.
Sheet by sheet, parchment takes form, ready to carry prayers not yet written and stories not yet told.
“This is the mission I live to fulfill,” Mahlet says.
And at just 24, she has only just begun.
