I ended the semester with a trip to Spain for my department’s M.A. colloquium and some NYU-Global responsibilities in Madrid; I had a conference the following week in Barcelona; and by the time all was said and done, I had been invited to a second conference in Córdoba and tacked on a week in Jerusalem to tie up some loose archival ends for an article I’m working on. It was a lot of work and it was exhausting, but I also managed to take a lot of pictures in Spain which in some way related to my academic and intellectual life.
Madrid is not a particularly medieval town; it’s a new capital with little of its early history readily visible. But there is currently an exhibition of objects from the Hispanic Society of America that are traveling while the HSA building is renovated. I was ambivalent about taking time to see things that I can see any time I want in New York but I’m s glad I went. It’s a completely different experience to see the HSA collection as works of art in a museum rather than as they are usually displayed, as the personal possessions of an eccentric crammed onto the walls of his mansion-turned-museum.
En route to one of my meetings with students, I popped into this neo-Mudéjar church (San Fermín de los Navarros) that has long captured my fancy; I was disappointed to discover that as neo-Mudéjar as the façade is, the interior is all neo-late-Romanesque.
Plus, one evening I was treated to “medieval week” on MasterChef. For a country with a pretty spectacular medieval past on which it could have drawn, this was about as goofy as a Renaissance faire.
Authenticity is always a fraught concept, but there’s a selection of the more authentically medieval the below the jump.
The conference in Córdoba took place in the Casa Árabe, which is a restored 15th century house with some original wall paintings that were rediscovered during the restoration. The geometric designs and very Christian figural paintings are pretty much the textbook-standard argument against the idea of any artistic style having a particular confession.
We were there during the “cruces de mayo” festival, which commemorates the Empress Helena’s discovery of the True Cross; different neighborhood associations decorate crosses with flowers and have parties with dancing, food, and drink. I liked this neighborhood association’s display because it has a pot of flowers sitting on an inverted column capital from Medinat al-Zahra — a modernized version of the very classically Cordoban practice of reusing the parts of despoliated monuments.
Our conference excursion was to the Great Mosque of Córdoba. I feel a little bit bad for any tour guide who has to take a bunch of medievalists through a medieval monument; my colleague who organized the conference kept having to remind us not to be pedantic pains-in-the-arse to the guy. It was interesting to hear a non-specialist Spaniard talk about the mosque as part of his own history: He wanted to make sure that we knew that “the mosque was built by the Arabs, not by the Moors.” The distinction he was making was between Arabs and Berbers and, in his telling, good guys and bad guys. Tour guide aside, the conference organizer arranged with the diocese for us to be able to enter the maqsura (the area in front of the wall niche that orients the mosque toward Mecca), which is normally closed off to tourists. The fact that it’s the diocese granting permission for this sort of thing pretty neatly encapsulates the history of the building, going back and forth from church to mosque. I lack the words to describe what it was like to see the details of this most luxurious part of the mosque up close; I almost felt frantic trying to take it all in and knowing that we would only be there for a few minutes. One specific thing was that I had never realized how small the tesserae on the mosaics are — they’re teeny!
I arrived in Barcelona the day before the conference and decided to visit Girona. It’s a gorgeously preserved medieval town; but you have to go without thinking about it having been a center of medieval Jewish life. Forget about Nachmanides, skip the Call, and just look at the stones and the soaring Catalan Gothic.
I had a free weekend between the two conferences and so of course I did some sightseeing; but it was more than that. During the semester that I spent teaching in Madrid in Spring 2015, my original plan had been to start on the second book using the resources in the Biblioteca Nacional and the CSIC libraries and to spend almost every weekend visiting different medieval cities and towns in Castile and environs, tromping around castles and churches that I had never visited. Shortly before my departure, I received a devastating critique of my book manuscript, and ended up spending the semester tied to my desk completely rewriting the thing. It was a very dispiriting experience to be so close to so much and unable to do anything about it; the one thing that kept me from truly losing my mind was that I kept telling myself that if I finished revising the book I’d get to keep my job and I’d get to keep coming back to Spain to do the research I wanted and to see the places I wanted to visit. This was my first trip back to Spain since my book appeared in print and since my tenure case went through, and so I devoted that interstitial weekend to keeping that promise to myself. I had put off so much and missed out on so much and delayed so much gratification in order to keep the first half of the bargain, that I wasn’t going to back out on the second half. One of the places I had really wanted to go was a civil war ghost town called Belchite; it’s a teeny town an hour outside of Zaragoza, which I had also never visited, so I made that my base for the weekend and toured the two cities on my own.
Zaragoza was very much the fulfillment of that promise to myself, and letting myself cash in on the delayed gratification (hence the gratuitous selfie). It was also about layers upon layers of languages and building foundations in ways that were really joyful.
Belchite, on the other hand, drove home the realization that in war there are no good guys; only bad guys doing bad things for the rightest of reasons. The city is a ruin left from when the Republicans in the civil war seized the city in a street-by-street, house-to-house battle in order to try to defend Zaragoza; Franco left the town in ruins for propaganda purposes and built the residents a new town nearby. So, rather than building up layers upon layers it is the remnants of a 20th-century destruction of the fourteenth; and as if it needed a further anti-war touch, the poppies were in bloom.
