History
The palace of Negus Tekle Haymanot was remodeled in 1926 by his son Ras Hailu Tekle Haymanot, in the style of European buildings after his tour of Europe in the party of Ras Tefari. By 1935, the town had postal, telegraph, and telephone service.
The Italians arrived in Debre Marqos 20 May 1936. Through an interpreter, Achille Starace, who had arrived by plane, told the surprised local inhabitants that he had come free them from their oppressors. Debre Marqos was later isolated, and practically besieged by a revolt in 1938. General Ugo Cavallero, with sixty thousand men and supported by airplanes and tanks, had crushed the revolt by the end of May. A major Italian fortification was located in the city during the existence of Italian East Africa, and captured by the British Gideon Force and Ethiopian Arbegnoch (or Resistance Fighters) 3 April 1941 during the East African Campaign.
In 1957, Negus Tekle Haimanot School in Debre Marqos was one of 9 provincial secondary schools in Ethiopia. The next year, the town was one of 27 places in Ethiopia ranked as a First Class Township. In 1960 a branch of the Ethiopian Electric Light and Power Authority had started operation in Debre Marqos.
Construction on Africa's first electric bus manufacturing factory began on 43 hectares of land in Debre Marqos in January, 2007 by Rus Afro Trolleybus, a joint Russian-Ethiopian partnership. CEO and major shareholder Getachew Eshetu has predicted that the factory will have the capacity to manufacture 500 trolley buses per year, and employ 5,000 people.
Read more about this topic: Debre Marqos
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“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“Spain is an overflow of sombreness ... a strong and threatening tide of history meets you at the frontier.”
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