Cordoba

We began today crossing a Roman bridge over the Guadalquivir river. Which is very swollen because, after three years of drought, Andalucia has had nearly six months of rain. It is a largely agricultural area – we have passed miles and miles of olive groves – so this is good news for the farmers.

On the far side of the bridge is a mosque that was built by the muslim kings of Morocco between the late 700s and the 1100s. It is difficult to convey the scale of the place. It would have held 17,000 (male) worshippers. The women were outside in the courtyard.

After the reconquistadora in the 1200s – when the Christians took Cordoba back from the muslims – the mosque became a Catholic cathedral. Where once all the arches facing the outside of the mosque were open to the courtyard or the street, the Christians enclosed them and each entry chamber became a mausoleum for the wealthy. If you can't buy your way to heaven, not sure if this was money well spent.

The workmanship on every wall and every ceiling was spectacular.

No photo can do it justice.

The arches were made of limestone and brick. If they were only limestone – too heavy. If they were only brick – not strong enough. How they figured that out in the 800s is beyond me. The wood ceiling below is restored. The original panels were hung outside in the courtyard.

Above is the holiest part of the mosque for muslims. Just around the corner is the holiest part for Catholics – a church within what was the mosque. Below is the choir stall – mahogany from cuba, gold from Mexico.

We have moved into Gothic architecture in this part.

Knowing the atrocious history of the Spanish in the new world (having been to Chile and Peru), I find the massive gold and silver crosses and statues hard to stomach (there was room after room of crosses and a monstrance – a huge gold and silver tower carried in parades). And of course cutting down forests of mahogany means extinction for entire ecosystems. I think my love of the natural world inhibits my appreciation for places of worship built on this scale, even as I marvelled at the skill of the craftsman. Does a divine being want to be praised by digging massive mines to produce gold, marble, limestone etc?

At the end of the day, I am applying modern sensibilities to historic peoples, who saw themselves as superior to other races and saw no contradiction between worshipping God and laying waste to the people and places they discovered when they sailed the seas.

It would be interesting to talk to a historian about what links the mosque and the cathedral to the dolmen builders of a few millennia earlier? What is it in humans that must be expressed in ways that enlarge our lives to a grander scale? When people travel around the world, we want to see the holy sites of the Buddhists and the Mayans and the Russian Orthodox and the Egyptians – because they all have the urge to reach for something that goes beyond human comprehension.

After the cathedral tour, Eddis and I walked around the Jewish quarter then had lunch. I had ratatoulli followed by chocolate cake and both were excellent. I then did some power shopping to be able to send mom a present from Spain. Finding a post office was a challenge, as was communicating with the postal clerk. He used Google translate to explain I had to have a Spanish address to mail something. Sigh. With 15 minutes until my bus left, he Google translated that I could use the post office address. He keyed in the required info, I paid the fare, then I hoofed it back to a square where I needed to rejoin my group and get on the bus.

14 March