Burial in the sky

Traveling in Kham: • Jashideley! • Burial in the sky

• Kangding, the gateway of Tibet • The Love Song of Kangding • The monastery of Tagong • The Buddhas of Drakgo

• The towers of the Himalayas • Nomadic wedding in Tibet • On the border of two Tibets. Dzokchen Monastery

I love cemeteries, those museums not mentioned in guidebooks, which often tell a different kind of history than the official one. Their stones have often been written with different letters, in a different language, with different terms, and sacralized with religious symbols different from those customary in the city today. Their style and motifs follow a standardized set of forms, which are nevertheless almost made private and intimate, and tell small stories that are not necessarily included in the greater history of the city. I visit them wherever I can.

I would have done so in the Kham-Tibetan Garzê, too, where I asked the monks in Kandze Monastery where their cemetery was. They looked at me shocked, then pointed upwards. “Do you bury in the sky?” “Yes.” I recalled my readings about the “sky burial” of Tibetan monks: that they hand over the corpses to the vultures beyond the monasteries, among the mountains, with the participation of only the monks and family members. As the Zoroastrians did until the Islamic regime of Iran forbade them to do so. Or their successors, the Indian Parsis, until the anti-inflammatory diclofenac, which had been given to cattle, wiped out the entire vulture population of India. This ritual is still followed in Tibet, but in recent years the Chinese government – in an act of good taste – banned tourists from taking part in it, filming it and then spreading the images on social media.

In the absence of my own recordings, here I include a report from forty years ago. One of the best contemporary Chinese authors, Ma Jian (1953-) lived a troubled and vagabond youth during the Chinese cultural revolution. In 1979, he became a photojournalist in Beijing, and it looked like he was settling down, but a divorce pushed him back onto the roads. He went to Tibet, where he spent three years in mountain villages, wandering between monasteries and camps of nomads. Of this period he wrote the small volume of short stories Stick out your tongue, in which he writes with unvarnished openness about the inhumane conditions prevailing in the Tibetan countryside. The book was banned in China immediately after its publication in 1987 as “doing harm to the fraternal solidarity between the country’s ethnic groups”.

The narratives, as if following a process of descent, gradually become darker and darker, bearing witness to increasingly cruel conditions. Although even the very first one, which talks about the “sky burial” of a young girl, is quite shocking.

The title page of the Italian translation of the book is a very accurate illustration of its content. A Tibetan boy holds the skull of a slaughtered yak in place of his own human head. Tie title of the translation – Stick out your tongue – could also be interpreted as a playful reference to the typical Tibetan way of greeting, but the original title is longer and more serious, testifying to the author’s determination to portray reality without idealism: 亮出你的舌苔或空空荡荡, liàngchū nǐde shétāi huò kōngkōng dàngdàng, “stick out your tongue [to diagnose your illness], or keep quiet”

The woman and the blue sky

Our bus ground to the top of the five-thousand-metre Kambala Pass. Behind us, a few army trucks were still struggling up the foothills. As the last clouds tore from the rocks and prayer stones on the summit and slipped down the gullies, Yamdrok Lake came into view. When the surface of the lake mirrored the blue sky and plunged the distant snow peaks head-first into the water, I was filled with a sudden longing to take someone in my arms. This was the mountain road to Central Tibet.

During the month that I’d stayed in Lhasa, I had visited many ancient monasteries and shrines, but it was to the Jokhang Temple that I’d returned most frequently. The Jokhang is Tibetan Buddhism’s most venerated site. Pilgrims from every corner of Tibet circle its walls in a continual stream, spinning prayer wheels, praying for an end to their suffering in this life and a prosperous rebirth in the next. Crowds prostrate themselves before the entrance, resembling professional athletes as they hurl themselves to the ground, stand up with hands clasped in prayer, then throw themselves down again. These displays of religious fervour appeal to foreign travellers, but sky burials arouse an even greater interest. While I was staying in Lhasa, I trekked to the burial site several times, camera in hand. But I never managed to see a burial: it would either be finished by the time I’d arrived, or relatives of the deceased would spot me from afar and tell me to stay away. Sometimes they even threw stones at me. I always ended up traipsing back to Lhasa in a bad mood.

I had been told that when a Tibetan dies, the relatives keep the body at home for three days, then carry it to the burial site, making sure not to look behind them as they walk. When they reach the village gates or a crossroads, they smash an earthenware jar onto the ground to ensure that the dead person’s soul will never return. At the funeral site, the burial master lights a fire of fragrant juniper branches. Wealthy families employ a lama to recite from the scriptures and relate to the guardians of the Buddha Realm the merits and achievements of the deceased. Depending on the level of these achievements, the deceased will either return to the world of men, or remain in the Buddha Realm for eternity. The burial master hacks all the flesh from the corpse and slices it into small pieces. He grinds the bones into a fine powder and adds some water to form a paste. (If the bones are young and soft, he will thicken it with ground barley.) He then feeds this paste, together with the flesh, to the surrounding hawks and vultures. If the deceased was a Buddhist, a holy swastika will be carved on the corpse’s back. When everything has been eaten, the master presents the scalp to the relatives, and the burial is considered to be complete. After that, the only way the relatives can communicate with the deceased is to go to the temple and pray.

I was travelling to the remote countryside of Central Tibet. When the bus reached the foot of the mountain and hurtled along the shores of Yamdrok Lake, I began to feel dizzy. I opened the window. The lake was calm; there wasn’t a speck of dust in the breeze. The bus, however, was crammed to the brim, and the stench of dank sheepskin that wafted from the back made it hard for me to breathe. When I could take it no longer, I told the driver to stop, and jumped out.

It was August. The Tibetan Plateau’s golden month. The sky was so blue and transparent, it felt as though there was no air. I walked to the shore of the lake, put down my bag, took out a flannel and washed my face. In the distance, at the foot of a mountain, I could see the village of Nagartse. A hundred or so mud houses stood in rows along the foothills, prayer flags jutting from each roof. Above them, halfway up the mountain, was a small Buddhist temple, its walls painted in strips of red and white with a band of blue running below the eaves. Beside it were the ruins of a monastery, and a freshly whitewashed stupa, housing the ashes of a dead saint, gleaming in the sun.

It was a beautiful place. The shores of the lake were clean. The water was so clear, I could see every pebble. Beams of sunlight shone right down to the bed. The coloured prayer flags on the distant roofs moved in the wind, whispering the beauty of the Buddha Realm. Below the houses, near the shore of the lake, stood a cement hut with a red tiled roof. I assumed it was the village headquarters, and pulled out from my bag a forged introduction letter that was stamped with a red seal. As I approached, I discovered that it was not the village headquarters, it was just an ordinary brick hut. A soldier stepped out. From his accent I could tell that he was from Sichuan. He invited me to come inside and sit down, so I followed him through the door. The hut was an army repair station. The soldier had been posted here to maintain the smooth connection of the army telephone line. When the line was working, he would go fishing on the lake, and read a few kung-fu novels too, I assumed — seeing the pile of them lying on the floor. He was delighted when I asked to stay. He had lived here for four years, and could speak Tibetan quite well. He often went up to the village to have a drink with the locals. A rifle hung from a nail on the wall. The room was a mess — it looked like a scrap yard.

I asked if there was a burial site nearby, and he said that there was. Then I asked if there had been any burials lately. He froze for a second, and told me that a woman in the village had recently passed away. When I asked whether I might be allowed to watch the burial, the soldier muttered audibly then said that he needed to buy some beer. I handed him some money, but he pushed it away and walked out of the door. It occurred to me that this might be my last chance to see a sky burial: I was unlikely to come across one again in the next few days. I couldn’t let this opportunity slip by.

In the evening, we opened the beers and chatted about the latest news from China. I tried to worm myself into his favour. He liked to fish, so I said that I liked fishing too, and promised that when I returned to Beijing I would send him an imported, stainlesssteel fishing rod. I gave him my address and bragged that Premier Zhao Ziyang lived right next door to me. Needless to say, you could search Beijing for days and never find the address that I scribbled down for him.Then I talked about women. He listened avidly, sucking at his cigarette. I told him wild stories about today’s liberated women, and in a Sichuan dialect I assured him that when he came to Beijing, I would let him sleep with my girlfriend. ‘No problem’, I said. He brushed his hand over the table, then paused and told me that the woman was only seventeen. I couldn’t believe it. So young. ‘She died of a haemorrhage during childbirth, he said. ‘The foetus is still inside her womb.’

I crushed out my cigarette. We both fell silent. The floor of the room was damp. A single bed was pushed against the wall. The bed was wooden and painted yellow; on its headboard were a red star and an army regiment number. The walls of the room were pasted with pages torn from colour magazines. A pile of hooks and electric cables lay scattered beneath the washstand behind the door. There was just one window in the room.The lower pane was covered with a sheet of newspaper. Through the upper pane, I watched the sky turn from dark blue to black. It had been a long time since I’d heard a truck pass by outside.

The soldier stood up, leaned against the bed and said, ’You can go to the burial if you like. The people here won’t mind. Most of them have never seen a camera before. Myima’s two husbands certainly haven’t.

‘Whose two husbands?’ I asked.

‘The dead woman’s.’

‘How come she had two husbands?’

‘She married two brothers, that’s why,’ he answered quietly.

I paused, then asked why she had married two brothers. But as soon as the question left my mouth, I realised how disrespectful it sounded. The woman was dead. It was no business of mine why she had married two men.

He answered me, though. ‘Myima was not from these parts. She was born in Nathula. She was a weak child, the youngest of eleven. When she was six years old, her parents sold her to another family in exchange for nine sheep hides.’

‘Does that kind of thing still happen, then?’ I asked.

He ignored my question and continued, “She grew stronger after she moved here. She even attended school in Lungmatse. That was before her adoptive mother died, though.’

‘And what was her name?’ I asked, taking a pen from my bag. It sounded like an interesting story.

‘Her adoptive father is a drunk. When he drinks too much he breaks into song and starts grabbing women. Sometimes he grabbed Myima. After his wife died, his behaviour got worse. How could a young girl protect herself against such a brute?’ His voice was trembling. I could tell that he was about to swear. When he’d been showing off to me a few minutes earlier, he’d let out a torrent of abuse.

‘Bloody bastard! Just wait until I’m out of these army clothes!’ His face turned from red to purple, in that surly, stubborn way typical of Sichuan men. I kept quiet and waited for his anger to subside.

He went to the door and checked the direction of the wind. The telephone line was completely still. I finished my beer and circled the room. Although it was summer, the altitude was so high that there were no mosquitoes. The damp air from the lake poured into the room and chilled my bones.

‘Will you take me to see the brothers?’ I asked.

Without looking round, he grabbed a set of keys and a torch from the table and said, ʻLet’s go.’

We climbed to the village along dark, narrow passages of mud and brick. The path was rough and bumpy. The straw and dung on the ground flinched back silently as my torchlight fell on them. Behind every wall, I could hear the sound of dogs barking.

The soldier pushed through a gate and shouted a few words of Tibetan at a house with a light at the window. We walked inside.

The men seated around the fire turned and stared at me, mouths agape. The eldest one stood up and started speaking in Tibetan with the soldier, while the others continued to gawp at me. I took out my lighter and flicked it on, then passed my cigarettes around. In the dark, all I could see was the white of the men’s teeth. I flicked the lighter again and let the flame rise. Their jaws slackened. I handed the lighter to the man who was standing up. He took it from me and sat down. Everyone’s eyes focused on the lighter. They passed it between them, looking up at me from time to time to exchange a smile. At last I felt that I could sit down. The young man next to me took a chunk of dried mutton from his bag and cut me a piece. I had tasted raw mutton like that in Yangpachen, so I pulled the knife from my belt and took a slice. They seemed pleased, and handed me a bowl of barley wine. It was still green, and there were husks floating on the surface. My mind turned to the dead woman.

The smell of burning dung was suffocating. I glanced around the room. It was as simply furnished as most Tibetan homes: prayer scarves draped over a wooden table, whitewashed walls. To the right of the front door was an opening into a dark chamber. I presumed that this was Myima’s room, or a larder, perhaps. Opposite the fireplace was a traditional Tibetan cabinet, and a scroll painting of Yama, Lord of Death, gripping the Wheel of Life in his hands and flashing his ferocious teeth. It was an old painting; its edges were pasted with scraps of coloured paper printed with words from the scriptures.

I guessed that the men were discussing my request to see the sky burial. A few of them were talking in Tibetan and nodding at me. The soldier stood up and gestured for me to follow him. He led me to the chamber and shone his torch on a large hemp sack that was tied at the top with cord and stood on a platform of mud bricks.

‘That’s her,’ he said.

I flashed my torch on the sack. She appeared to be sitting upright, facing the door, her head bowed low. I presumed that the men had had to push her head down before they could tie up the sack.

Back in the soldier’s hut, I lay on the bed, eyes wide open, imagining what the woman had looked like. She could sing, like the Tibetan women I’d heard in the forests or high on the mountain paths. At noon, she bound her sheepskin cloak to her waist, and bent down over the fields, her long braids of hair slipping over her ears. I gave her the face of a girl I’d seen on a bus: large red cheeks, small nose, dark-rimmed eyes, a steady gaze. Her neck was soft and pale. As I stood beside her, I could see the dark dip between her breasts tremble with each shake of the bus.

The soldier walked in from his nightly inspection of the telephone line and switched on the light. His face was blank. He lit a cigarette and lay down beside me. Neither of us was in a mood to sleep.

Eventually he spoke. ‘I might as well tell you. You’ll be gone in a few days. Besides, I can’t keep this to myself much longer. The pain is too much.’ I propped a pillow against the wall and sat up.

‘Myima and I were very close,’ he continued. ‘That’s why I’ve stayed here so long. Most people would have applied for a transfer years ago. I first met her up on the mountain. I’d climbed up to repair the telephone line two mountains behind. She had let her sheep out and was sitting on the grass. On my way back, I was carrying a large bundle of wire. It weighed a ton. I said hello and sat down beside her. Her dog glanced at me then went back to sleep. It was a hot afternoon. Her sheep had wandered off to graze on a breezy slope. She smiled, then looked at me straight in the eye, without any shame or embarrassment. I told her I worked in the repair station below. She didn’t understand me, so I traced my finger along the telephone line to my house at the bottom. She laughed and turned her face to the Kambala Pass. Two trucks were driving up the foothills over there, too far away for us to hear. Myima said that she’d seen me before, and asked why I’d stayed here so long. Her accent was different from the other Tibetans in the village. Before I left her that day, I cut off a long piece of wire and gave it to her as a present. I told her that she could use it to hang out her laundry or to tie things up with.

‘After that, I often went up the mountain to see her. She’d be sitting there, waiting for me, with home-made dried mutton and barley wine. Sometimes she made gin for me from dates and mountain pears. I would stay with her until sunset. She was cleaner than most Tibetan girls — I grew to like the smell of mutton and milk on her skin. One day, I stretched my hand out to unfasten the belt of her sheepskin cloak. She didn’t push me away, so I put my arm around her. She was the first woman I’d ever touched. After that, as soon as I got close to her, or my hand brushed against her cloak, I’d panic. I could tell that she wanted me to put my hand inside her cloak, but I was too afraid. She told me how her adoptive father kept grabbing her, and how she’d often run away and be too frightened to return home. Everyone in the village knew about it. All the young men in the village looked down on her.

‘Last year, at about this time of night, she burst in to my room and felt her way to my bed. She had never slept here before … We spent the whole night together. In the morning, she pushed me aside and said that she had to leave. I helped her get dressed, then I went back to bed. Before she left, she took off the turquoise necklace she’d worn since she was a child and slipped it under my pillow. It wasn’t until the next day that I found out that she’d agreed to marry the two brothers.’

He paused and looked up at me. ‘If this gets out, I’m finished. My leaders will kill me.’

I nodded solemnly, and gestured to him that I would keep my lips sealed. That is why, in this story, I refer to him only as ‘the soldier.’

He took out the necklace from the drawer. I held it under the lamp and studied it closely. It was a string of agate and red wooden beads, with a large lump of turquoise in the middle. The turquoise was smooth and dark, and still smelt of the woman’s milky skin. I thought of her now, sitting in the hemp sack on the platform of mud bricks.

‘Did she visit you again after that?’ I asked.

‘No. After she got married, she was busy with her chores and seldom left the house. The brothers liked her very much, apparently. Whenever they’d had a drink, the villagers would hear Myima yelling late into the night. The younger brother was even seen making love to Myima on his horse as he rode back from Wangdan Temple. Myima was already pregnant by then. The brothers were in their forties. They’d never been married before.

‘Why didn’t she visit you again?’

‘She did,’ the soldier replied. ‘I just don’t want to tell you everything.’

When I reached the sky burial site, the sun had already risen. This wasn’t a large flat boulder jutting from a cliff like the burial site in Lhasa, it was a gravel terrace halfway up the mountain between the foothills and the higher slopes. Dirty ropes hung from metal posts that were jammed into cracks in the ground. Beside them lay rusty knives, two hammers and an axe with a broken handle. The gravel was scattered with scraps of bone, clumps of hair, smashed rings, glass beads and bird droppings dotted with human fingernails. The mountain was silent. Hawks and vultures sat perched on the summit. In the valley below, ribbons of mist rose from Yamdrok and rolled into a single sheet that slowly covered the entire lake. The mist thickened and spread, rising and falling like the chest of a woman breathing, drifting higher and higher until it veiled the blood-red sun. The mist still clinging to the lake trembled slightly, then broke free and floated towards the foothills.

Slowly they emerged from the mist. The elder brother was lugging the hemp sack. I guessed that they couldn’t afford to hire a burial master, or that perhaps there were none in the area. The younger brother was carrying a felt bag, a thermos flask and a frying pan. A lama followed behind. I recognised him as the man who’d sat beside me the night before in Myima’s home. Clouds of mist billowed behind them.

They smiled at me. The sack was opened and Myima’s body was pulled out. She was lying in the foetus position, her limbs bound to her chest. The auspicious swastika that had been carved onto her back had dried and shrunk. When the rope was loosened she flopped to the ground. They tied her head to a metal post and pulled her body straight. She was flat on her back now, her eyes fixed on the sky and the scattering clouds of mist.

The younger brother lit a fire of juniper twigs and sprinkled roasted barley on the flames. The thick smoke rose into the mist. Then he moved to a second fire and dropped a lump of yak butter into a frying pan that was resting on a wooden frame. The elder brother fed dung pats to the two fires and glanced at the mountain summit. The lama sat cross-legged on a sheepskin rug counting rosary beads over an open prayer book. He was sitting close to the flames. I studied the corpse from a distance, then slowly approached. Her limbs were splayed out as though she were preparing to take flight. Her breasts were paler than the rest of her body and drooped softly to either side of her ribcage. Her belly was swollen, the unborn child still lying inside it. I wondered whether the soldier was the father of the child.

I set the aperture of my camera, adjusted the distance, then squatted down beside her and prepared to take a photograph. In the background were clouds of fog and snow peaks flushed by the rising sun. Through the lens, Myima looked like a little girl. I imagined her arriving at this mountain on horseback as a child of six, peeping out from under her sheepskin cloak to catch her first glimpse of the Kambala Pass. Years later, when she was up here tending her sheep, she would often gaze at the pass and think about her home in the south.

She looked as though she were asleep. I panned my camera down her body. Soft arms, palms upturned to the sky, a red mole under her breast, smooth thighs. I thought of the soldier’s creaking wooden bed and of the two brothers who were now gulping the barley wine. I focused on her feet. The soles were white, the toes tightly clenched. The smallest toes were so short there was no room for nails to grow. I stepped back for a wider view and hit the shutter, but nothing happened. I checked the camera, pressed the button again. It was stuck. My legs gave way. I sat down on the ground, wound back the film and changed the battery. I focused on Myima’s face this time and pressed the shutter, but the button seemed to be frozen in place. Then, as I looked up, I noticed the corner of Myima’s mouth twitch. It was neither a smile nor a sneer, but her mouth definitely moved.

I stood up. A shriek echoed through my head then vanished with a gust of wind. A bald eagle plummeted through the sky, circled the corpse’s head, settled on a rock and ruffled its wings.

I tramped back to the fire. The younger brother reached into his felt bag, scooped out a piece of dung and flung it onto the flames.Then he produced a lump of roast barley and broke me off a piece. I chewed it greedily. There were raisins inside. He brought out some dried mutton and filled the lid of the thermos flask with barley wine. I grabbed it and downed it in one. I wondered whether Myima had prepared the mutton. I looked up at her. Her legs were spread open; a piece of string hung from the wounded flesh between her thighs. I presumed that someone had attached it during her troubled labour in an attempt to wrench the baby out. I dragged my knife through the dried mutton. The brothers smiled at me. I smiled too, perhaps, but my face was turned to the distant snowcaps that were reddening in the sun. The fog had vanished, and in the distance Yamdrok looked as calm as it had done the day before, and as blue as Myima’s turquoise.

The elder brother got up, threw some more dung onto the fires, then walked to the lama and poured him some wine. The lama pushed the bowl away and announced that Myima’s soul had risen to the sky. The younger brother stood up and took a sharp knife from his pocket. I followed the two brothers to the body. Immediately the sky darkened with vultures that screeched and swirled through the air. The brothers turned Myima’s body over, stuck the knife into her buttock and pulled it down, opening up her leg all the way to the sole of her foot. The younger brother hacked off a chunk of thigh and sliced it into pieces. Her right leg was soon reduced to bone. With her belly squashed to the ground, sticky fluid began to trickle from between her thighs. I picked up my camera, set the distance, and this time the shutter closed with a snap.

The vultures surrounded us and fought over the scraps of flesh. A pack of crows landed behind them. Perhaps they considered themselves an inferior species, because not one of them dared move forward. They kept their distance, sniffing the air, waiting for their turn.

The morning sun flooded the burial site with light. The younger brother shooed away the approaching vultures with pieces of Myima’s body. I picked up the axe, grabbed a severed hand, ran the blade down the palm and threw a thumb to the vultures. The younger brother smiled, took the hand from me and placed it on a rock, then pounded the remaining four fingers flat and threw them to the birds.

When the elder brother dug his knife into Myima’s chin and drew it up her face, I suddenly forgot what she had looked like. While the brothers continued to carve, her eyes remained fixed on the sky above, until every piece of her head vanished from the site.

The elder brother snatched a bunch of Myima’s braids that were still tied with red thread, swirled it around the circling vultures and staggered back to the fire. The crows had now joined the vultures at the metal posts, and were picking at the roast barley that had been mashed up with scraps of brain.

I checked my watch. I had been up here for two hours already. It was time to go down. I knew that the soldier was waiting for me in his room. He’d promised that he would borrow a boat in the afternoon and take me fishing on the lake.”

The last journey of Lady Veruna

Germany, like Austria and Hungary, has its own Danube Bend, which is protected by monuments typical of German history and culture: on the west, Europe’s oldest brewery, and on the east, the Kelheim Liberation Monument. However, deep in Weltenburg, in the Danube wall of a Franciscan monastery, there is a third, relatively uncharacteristic monument that commemorates a completely different German history. Its Hebrew inscription is at least 800 years old, but it is still legible. Its sad origins lead downstream to the imperial city of Regensburg.

A tombstone in Hebrew  the wall of Trauntal Monastery

According to György Sajó’s reading, the Hebrew inscription reads: Tomb of Lady Veruna [?], daughter of the community leader Moshe. Died in the year 4960 [?], the second day of the month of Iyyar, Tuesday. May she rest in peace in the Garden of Eden.

I wonder what a Jewish woman’s tombstone with a Hebrew inscription is doing in the wall of a Franciscan monastery founded in the mid-15th century?

This reading of the year of the 11-line tombstone is uncertain, due to the fault line running through it. If the above reading is correct, it indicates April 25, 1200, which was indeed a Tuesday. This means that the tombstone could only be placed secondarily in the wall of the monastery, which certainly had no Jewish resident. Due to its location, the tombstone has a relatively well-explored past. A simple search reveals that Lady Veruna’s tombstone was originally located in the medieval Jewish cemetery in Regensburg. After the liquidation of the cemetery, the tombstones were destroyed and scattered just like the Jews themselves after the all-German pogroms in the 15th century. According to a list of the tombstones from the Regensburg cemetery, this one in the wall of the Trauntal monastery is the second oldest surviving example. Here, on the banks of the Danube it at least survived and was not crushed to dust, reused as building material, or met a terrible fate like the tombstone of Gutel, daughter of David of Regensburg, who died in 1336/1337 (see below).

The Jewish community of Regensburg was one of the oldest and largest in German territory, north of the Alps. The first documented mention of the presence of Jews dates from 981, but they had probably lived in the city continuously since the Carolingian era. At the beginning of the 11th century, their place of residence is also mentioned under the name “Judæorum habitacula”. From about the early 1200s, the area around today’s Neupfarrplatz gradually became the Jewish quarter, a small town within the town, encircled by the old Roman city walls. They received their privileges from the Holy Roman Emperor. They were under his protection, governed by their own council, and they also had their own seal with their coat of arms: a crescent moon and a Star of David (or, as it was called then, Solomon’s Seal) and with the inscription: חותם קהל ריגנשבורק, hotam kahal Rignsburk, “seal of the [Jewish] community of Regensburg.

In Regensburg, the city magistrate and the imperial power usually protected the Jews, primarily because of the tax revenue coming from them. This is how the city avoided pogroms. Although all the Jews in the city were forcibly baptized during the Crusades, they were allowed to return to their original faith after the intervention of the emperor. When Lady Veruna died, the Jews were still living in relative freedom within the city walls. However, starting in the 13th century, they were restricted to the Jewish quarter, had to wear distinctive clothes, and were not allowed to enter the Christian quarter on major holidays. This was ensured by the lockable gates of the Jewish quarter, supervised by the Jews themselves. We know of six such gates in the late Middle Ages. Their place is indicated by the traces of the still existing side streets that once led to the Jewish quarter. Five of the gates are no longer traceable, but one still exists today, although not in its original form. It opens from a narrow passageway at Tändlergasse 9-11. No archaeological traces of the wall have been found so far.

The Jews of Regensburg enganged in trade, money lending, and gold and silversmithing, and were considered fairly wealthy during the Middle Ages. It is no coincidence that Bavaria’s second largest coin treasure, which may have been hidden around 1387, was found in the area of the former Jewish quarter. The treasure contained 624 gold coins, most of them of Hungarian mintage from the 14th century. However, towards the end of the 15th century, when Regensburg’s economy began to decline, the city’s citizens were slowly impoverished, and a part of the craftsmen became unemployed. Religious intolerance grew in parallel with this, and the city council was more and more inclined to make Jews the scapegoat and appease social discontent by expropriating their wealth.

The location of the medieval Jewish quarter in Regensburg, around today’s Neupfarrplatz, inside the Roman city walls, on its western side (source)

However, the implementation of this encountered obstacles, as Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I took their side, since he expected serious tax revenue from the Jews, who paid taxes not only to the city, but also to the ruler, the bishop and the Duke of Bavaria. Although it is also true that, towards the end of the 15th century, they were already often unable to pay the increasing taxes. However, Maximilian died on January 12, 1519, and the people of Regensburg immediately took advantage of the interregnum and started anti-Jewish demonstrations. In addition to social discontent, the seeds of this were the common blood libels of the era, according to which the Jews kidnapped Christian children in order to use their blood for the Passover.

In February 1519, the city council sealed off the Jewish quarter to prevent bloodshed, and cannons were towed to its six gates. On February 21, a resolution was passed to expel the Jews, who were given two weeks to leave the city. The imperial commissioner Thomas Fuchs von Wallburg, whose task was to represent the interests of the emperor, i.e. to protect the Jews, also must have been involved in their expulsion. Presumably for good money, he notified the wealthiest Jews in advance, who had left Regensburg with their possessions before the decision was announced. The Jews had to evacuate the synagogue, from which the holy objects were removed to the rabbi’s house, where the Jews themselves then destroyed them, lest they fall into the hands of the Christians. The city council managed to maintain order during the exodus of the Jews, but the harsh weather in February cost the lives of two post-natal mothers. The Jews did not go far. Some of them settled in Stadtamhof and Sallern, which were practically northern suburbs of Regensburg, but stood under the authority of the Duke of Bavaria. However, later in the 16th century, they were also expelled from here, and some of them left for Tyrol or Poland.

Albrecht Altdorfer: The Gothic synagogue of Regensburg (source)

After the expulsion of the Jews, the local population almost immediately destroyed the synagogue. One of the surviving engravings of the old building was made by Albrecht Altdorfer, who allegedly also participated in the demolition. During the unprofessional demolition work, a master stonemason named Jakob Kern fell while destroying an arch, and was trapped under the debris. However, they managed to dig him out from under the ruins without a scratch, which the witnesses believed to be divine intervention. The news spread quickly, and a wooden church dedicated to the Virgin Mary was soon built on the site. Soon so many pilgrims came here from all over Bavaria that they decided to build a large stone church.

For this, additional space was needed in the narrow quarter divided by small alleys. So they began to demolish the houses of the Jewish quarter, which had been continuously expanded, joined and superimposed over the centuries. Their number in 1519 was about forty, and they housed 500 local Jewish residents and 80 students of the Talmud schools. However, the houses were so much supported by each other, that the demolition of one of them usually involved the collapse of the neighboring house. According to contemporary sources, three to four thousand people took part in the demolition work and the removal of the debris. Even the episcopal administration, the secular clergy and the monastic orders took their part in the destruction fueled by religious fanaticism. Only one Jewish house remained standing, the cheder school, which later housed the sacristan of the Neupfarrkirche until its demolition in 1857.

Das „letzte Judenhaus” in Regensburg (source)

The Neupfarrplatz is located southwest of Regensburg Cathedral. It is a surprisingly spacious square compared to the fabric of the city and the surrounding alleyways. Its central location is occupied by the Lutheran church, which began to be built just before the city’s conversion to the Reformation. The first Protestant communion took place within its walls on October 15, 1542, after the city council converted to the reformed religion, yielding to the wishes of the majority. The construction of the “New Parish Church” started in 1519, just a few days after the city council expelled the Jews from Regensburg. But the Evangelicals had nothing to do with this. Originally a Catholic pilgrimage church, dedicated to the “Beautiful” Virgin Mary, was to be built here, allegedly on the site of the destroyed synagogue, as if emphasizing the triumph of the citizens over the “infidels”.

The pilgrimage church dedicated to the Virgin Mary, built in the site of the destroyed Jewish quarter. Woodcut of Michael Ostendorfer, ca. 1520 (source)

In 1996, archaeologists excavated the unbuilt parts of the square, thanks to which the structure of the Jewish quarter could be roughly reconstructed. The most important discovery was that the Neupfarrkirche was not build on the site of the synagogue, but to the east of it. In this way, a memorial place to the former synagogue could be created. They also found the mikveh of the Jewish quarter with a 9-meter deep well, and the Jewish community house called the Brauthaus.

Archaeological research also identified the medieval Jewish cemetery that hosted Lady Veruna’s tomb. It lay outside the city wall to the south, next to the Peter’s Gate. This area is now north of the railway station, around the intersection of Albertstraße and Maximilianstraße. The land for the cemetery was purchased by the Jewish community around 1210, so Lady Veruna’s grave must have been one of the earliest burials. The cemetery, which was originally surrounded by a high wall, may once have contained about four to five thousand tombstones, of which only a hundred are known, either in whole or in fragmentary form. Despite the fact that most of them have illegible inscriptions, local historians still pay special attention to them. Their first census was also financed by the city council as early as the 18th century. Since then, the number of known tombstones has decreased to ca. sixty pieces. A public area also bears their memory in Regensburg, the Am Judenstein Street in the western part of the medieval city center, between the Holy Cross Dominican monastery and the Heart of Jesus parish church, with a large Jewish tombstone on its corner, illegible due to destruction by external forces.

Jewish tombstone. Am Judenstein, Regensburg

In 1519, the citizens of Regensburg demolished the wall of the cemetery as well, and carried away the tombstones, mainly as building material, but several of them were walled into the façades of the houses as trophies, a sign of the victory over the Jews. A Calvary with three crosses was built on the site of the cemetery. Rumor has it that most of the tombstones were used in the construction of the Neupfarrkirche, together with the construction debris from the Jewish quarter. Many tombstones may still be hidden in the walls or under the plaster of the 16th-century houses of Regensburg. Some of the gravestones probably reached, by way of the pilgrims, the more distant settlements of Bavaria and Upper Austria.

This procedure can be regarded as general during the pogroms that swept across German cities in the 15th and 16th centuries. The city of Erfurt, for example, expelled their Jews in 1453, and the tombstones of the Jewish cemetery were also used for construction and street pavement. And the “Medieval Hebrew Inscriptions: a European Database” project of the Central European University points out that the vast majority of the ca. 5000 known medieval Jewish inscriptions are Jewish tombstones of secondary use. This method would be eerily repeated during WWII, when the gravestones of many Jewish cemeteries in Nazi-occupied Poland were used to pave roads.

Among the tombstones, the most horrific fate probably befell that of Gutel, daughter of David, in which a hole was punched in the middle and used as a latrine seat in the dungeon of the Old Town Hall.

The sad fate of the tombstone of Gutel, daughter of David (source)

Lady Veruna’s ashes were scattered, but as her last journey, her tombstone went from Regensburg to Kelheim, “thanks” to the collection of trophies by the Franciscan monks from Trauntal. This is how it was able to survive, and to this day it monitors the ebb and flow of the Danube. And her memory is preserved by a somewhat more tolerant posterity in Bavaria.

Columbus’ coffin

“It floats between heaven and earth, like the coffin of Muhammad.” That’s how the old saying goes — though it’s not quite true, since Muhammad’s coffin rests peacefully in the soil of Medina. The image comes from Vita Mahumeti, an 11th-century European “biography” of Muhammad written by Embricho of Mainz, which claimed that the Prophet’s coffin was magically suspended by magnets — a clever trick meant to mimic the levitating Christian saints and impress gullible believers.

But there really are at least two coffins that hang between heaven and earth. One of them, surprisingly, belongs to a Muslim true believer — Father Bem.

The floating coffin of a Muslim general

After losing the Battle of Temesvár on August 9, 1849, the Polish general of the Hungarian war of independence of 1848-1849, Józef Bem, fled to Constantinople. The Ottoman army, impressed by his reputation, gladly took him in — but military rank was reserved for Muslims only. So Bem, along with seventy-four officers, converted to Islam. He served faithfully in Aleppo until his death on December 10, 1850.

When his remains were returned to his hometown of Tarnów in 1929, the Polish Church refused to bury a Muslim in consecrated ground. There was no other cemetery — save for the Jewish one, which was deemed inappropriate — so the townspeople came up with an ingenious solution. They placed Bem’s sarcophagus on six Corinthian columns rising from the middle of an ornamental pond in a city park — suspended literally between heaven and earth. Even his Turkish name is inscribed on it: مراد پاشا, (Murad Pasha).

The other floating coffin

The other coffin that seems to hover above the ground belongs to Christopher Columbus, in Seville Cathedral. (Though if any “conversion” took place in his story, it had nothing to do with the coffin’s levitation.)

The monument’s designer, Arturo Mélida (1849–1902), was a historicist artist who looked to the grand funerary art of Columbus’s era — the tomb of Philippe Pot in the Louvre (c.1480), Hieronymus Cock’s 1559 engraving of Emperor Charles V’s funeral procession, as well as Francisco Pradilla’s wildly successful 1877 painting Doña Juana the Mad.

Columbus died in Valladolid on May 20, 1506, and was buried in the local Franciscan church. At his son Diego’s request, the remains were moved to Seville in 1509 — the very port from which he had set sail in 1492. There, in the Carthusian monastery he had loved during his lifetime, he was laid to what was supposed to be his eternal rest.

That eternity was short-lived.

In 1536 or 1544, Columbus’s bones — along with Diego’s — were shipped to Santo Domingo (today’s Dominican Republic), to rest in the newly completed Cathedral of Santa María de la Encarnación. When Spain ceded the island to France in 1795, the remains were moved again, this time to Havana.

In mid-19th-century Havana, plans were made to honor Columbus properly. A public monument was first proposed, then relocated to the cathedral. To strengthen the symbolic bond between Spain and the colony, the monument was commissioned from Madrid’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts. Arturo Mélida won the competition, and his majestic tomb was unveiled in 1891. When Spain lost Cuba in 1898, the coffin made one final journey — back to Seville, where it was installed in 1902 in the Cathedral.

A rival tomb appears

Meanwhile, in 1877, an urn was discovered in Santo Domingo with the inscription: “To the illustrious and distinguished man, Don Colón, Admiral of the Ocean Sea.”

In 2006, scientists at the University of Granada tested the DNA from Seville’s coffin and confirmed that it matched Columbus’s brother Diego. So perhaps the Santo Domingo urn holds his son Diego’s ashes — who bore the same title

A remarkable life indeed for Don Colón — but what a restless afterlife.

A wax model of Mélida’s Columbus monument can be seen today in Madrid’s Prado Museum

Designing glory

By 1891, Arturo Mélida was already one of Spain’s leading historicist architects and sculptors. He had studied the late Gothic and Renaissance styles of the 15th–16th centuries, including the mudéjar (Moorish-inspired) and plateresque (ornamental Renaissance) traditions. In 1881 he had even been chosen to restore Toledo’s Monastery of San Juan de los Reyes — the great national shrine founded by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1478. Within this same visual and ideological framework, he conceived Columbus’s tomb.

When the monument was finally brought back from Cuba in 1899 and destined for Seville Cathedral, a suitable location had to be found. The obvious choice was the “Old Virgin Chapel”, from where sailors had prayed to the Madonna before setting sail — and to which they returned to give thanks. But the grand monument would have overwhelmed the tiny chapel. So instead, it was placed in the transept, directly before a vast fresco of Saint Christopher, Columbus’s patron saint.

The bearers of Spain

Four allegorical figures carry the Admiral’s coffin — representing Spain’s four historic kingdoms. The lineup, however, reflects a certain 19th-century nationalist bias.

At the front stand Castile and León — although these two realms had merged as early as 1230. Separated again here, they appear more than just one. Behind them are Aragon and Navarre. Mélida downplayed Aragon’s role, explaining that it had “little part in the discovery of the New World.” True enough: by royal decree, Aragonese merchants were banned from Atlantic trade. Even today, Barcelona’s Columbus statue faces away from the sea — as if to declare, “We weren’t part of that.”

Castile wears a cloak emblazoned with a castle and holds an oar adorned with a dolphin — symbolizing royal permission for Columbus’s voyage

León, whose name comes not from the lion but from the Roman Legio VI, as is proved by its medieval name regnum Legionense, proudly displays the beast nonetheless, along with scallop shells for Galicia and pomegranates for Granada. His cross-tipped spear pierces a pomegranate — a direct allusion to Granada’s conquest in 1492, the same year Columbus set sail

Aragon, Spain’s other founding kingdom of 1492, should wear the red-and-yellow stripes of its coat of arms. But by the late 19th century, those stripes had become a Catalan nationalist symbol, so Mélida substituted another regional emblem — a bat, borrowed from the kingdom of Valencia, which once belonged to Aragon. It was probably originally a dragon, a griffin, or some other more heraldic beast, but by the 13th century it had turned into a bat — accompanied by the legend that the army of King James I of Valencia, fighting against the Muslims, was awakened by the fluttering of bats just in time to repel a night attack by the enemy

Finally comes Navarre, which Spain annexed only in 1512. Its emblem is a chain arranged in a curious eight-pointed pattern, with a turquoise gem at the center. It also has its legend, according to which, in the victorious Battle of Navas de Tolosa in 1212 — known to the Andalusian Muslims as maʿerakat al-eikab, “the Battle of Punishment” — the Navarrese troops supposedly broke through certain chains, penetrated the Muslim leader’s tent, and seized his jewel. So be it.

Women in armor

Yet, for all their pomp, these coffin-bearers look oddly delicate. Shouldn’t an admiral’s coffin be carried by grizzled sailors or rugged soldiers? Instead, Mélida gives us smooth-faced, almost feminine figures — in fact, they are women dressed as men.

Women, dressed in men’s clothes and playing male roles — or maybe hermaphrodites? — in a cathedral? Wrap it up!

But not so fast.

Christian iconography is full of armed, armored women — personifications of virtues battling the equally female personifications of sin, in the psychomachia (“battle for the soul”) tradition dating back to Prudentius. They stand, sword in hand, at the north portal of Chartres Cathedral and are codified by Cesare Ripa’s 1593 Iconologia, the encyclopedic manual of allegory that defined such imagery for centuries.

And why women? Because in the Romance languages, abstract nouns — and thus the virtues, and even “regions” (regiones) — are feminine. To depict Spain’s four realms as male warriors would have seemed just as jarring to a Spanish viewer as these female figures do to one whose language, like Hungarian, lacks grammatical gender.