[2] Gunda Gunde was founded by followers of Saint Estifanos seeking a refuge from the persecutions of their beliefs in the late 14th and early 15th centuries, finding it in the remote region of the modern Irob woreda.

[3] According to a tradition recorded by Justin de Jacobis, the monastery was built on a crater where a dragon named Gabella dwelled, which was appeased with the periodic sacrifice of young women until the monks' prayers tamed it.

[5] Its remoteness also saved Gunda Gunde from the 16th century ravages of the Muslim assault by the forces of Imam Ahmad Gragn, which had plundered or destroyed many churches and other centers of Ethiopian Christianity.

de Jacobis visited Gunda Gunde in the 1840s, the internal disorder of the Ethiopian Church had made it receptive to his missionary work: several monks converted to Catholicism, and its abbot Walda Giyorgis (died 1850) was openly pro-Catholic.

[7] Several years later Beatrice Playne, excited at the prospect of finding a religious site that had avoided Ahmad Gragn's attention, visited the monastery in 1948.

After travelling for two days across several roadless mountain ranges, she found Gunda Gunde in a narrow valley with "cultivated gardens on either bank... irrigated by a careful system of wooden, trough-like pipes and primitive aqueducts".

[8] Just as its remoteness had discouraged Imam Ahmad from visiting, so the Derg likewise failed to impose their authority on this distant corner of Ethiopia -- although the Tigray People's Liberation Front reportedly held a field conference at Gunda Gunde in the late 1980s.