Christmas in Mallorca

The question of “where is the most beautiful Christmas” touches emotional archetypes. To some in the high mountains, where there is still real snow and plenty of pine trees so huge that even the smallest one beats the Parliament’s Christmas tree. To some others, in the southern seas, where there is no snow and pines, but, in contrast, there are palm trees and heat. Both offer a way out of everyday life, to another, cleaner, ideal world. To me it is where so many other things are most beautiful: the beach, the orange and olive grove, and the seven-hundred-year-old sounding in a single soprano voice in the darkened cathedral on Christmas night.

El Cant de la Sibiŀla, Mallorca. Jordi Savall, Montserrat Figueras, La Capella Reial de Catalunya, 1998 (36'50)

The ideal world also sends a message even when you cannot get there. No one would think of this picture as being a Christmas postcard, though it is. In the top, only indicatively, the same sea as in the pictures of the just linked post. In the middle, the tops of the olive trees. And in the foreground, the garden of Wang Wei, with a severe hiatus: the stump of the beautiful and beloved pine tree that the storm tore out a year ago. But the focus of the image is not this lack, not the loss, but the small red promise towering in front of it. Like in Fereidun Moshiri’s Believe in the spring.

The postcard in my little home Kunstkammer, together with a mediterranean Venus found on the other sea

Bethlehem in Cordoba

The former Jewish quarter of Cordoba is organized around Renaissance palaces with arcaded inner coutyards, which until 1492 were owned by wealthy Jewish merchant families, and then by Castilian aristocrats. I will write about them soon. Now I only want to write about the one in which we find Jews even five centures after their expulsion in 1492. And not just Jews, but an entire Jewish city. Or perhaps two.

The 16th-century palace of the Marquis of Motilla – theirs is also the 10th-century Almodóvar, the best-kept Spanish castle where many scenes of the Game of Thrones were shot – is a Catholic youth center today. Its gate is invitingly open in the weeks before Christmas, when a model of Bethlehem is on display in its courtyard.

The belén or presepe is a genre of representation in the Mediterranean, with parishes and communities competing to create a more vivid and more touching Nativity scene. But here it is as if they really wanted to create a model of the ancient Bethlehem, in the full length of the courtyard.

The city model begins at the only gate of Bethlehem, surrounded by the typical clay houses of the Middle East. In the background, Roman soldiers (eunt domus!) are just promulgating the census decre of Emperor Augustus. In the foreground, the first Bethlehem expats are already arriving home, and negotiating accommodation at the inn. The rabbit in the vegetable garden feels totally safe, as its flesh is not kosher. To the right, the small house with the woman exiting in contrapposto with the probably full bucket, and with the chariot of firewood, is a real Italian neorealistic movie cutout.

We see the inside of a carpenter’s workshop, with the carpenter angrily sawing, and his little son sitting on the ground and watching him with reverence. Of course, there had to be some carpenter’s workshops in Bethlehem. But if we move a little aside, we also see the young wife sitting in the back room. This is too many hints to miss the Holy Family. However, then we are a few years later and in another city, Nazareth.

John Everett Millais, Christ in the house of his parents (The carpentry shop), 1850

That Nazareth is in fact already present in Betlehemben, is confirmed by the next scene, where the angel greets the same young woman in her room in Nazareth. The dove of the Holy Spirit has just arrived upon the roof.

And right next to it, another angelic apparition: the annunciation to the shepherds, who are about to direct their flocks to the city. But the camels of the three kings have already gotten there, and just kneeling down to offer the gift bags.

And meanwhile, life goes on without stopping among the houses of the city: a fair is held, carpets, pots and vegetables are sold, they are washing and fishing in the creek. “When the aged reverently, passionately waiting / For the miraculous birth, there always must be / Others, who did not specially want it to happen…”

And finally the camera, like in a panoramic shot, return to its starting point, the city gate. But time has passed in the meantime. The couple, who had just entered the gate and got a baby, are now leaving the city and the country, away for Egypt. Here the story falls off the sand table, and continues in the Ethiopian frescoes.

The Elephant’s Well

Ten kilometers west of Cordoba lies Medinat Al-Zahra, the Shining City, built as the most beautiful city of the world by Abdurrahman III in 929, on the occasion of declaring himself the caliph of Andalusia, as a sign of his independence from the Sunni caliph of Baghdad and the Shiʿa caliph of Cairo. Today, only the central part of the city is standing, deprived of all its ornaments, carvings and noble wall coverings, but even in it ruins, it clearly testifies to its former beauty and richness.

Directly above the city rises the Sierra Morena range, a national park whose springs once supplied the city with water. One of these springs is a few kilometers above the town, in the main square of the present-day town of Santa María de la Trassierra. The spring is today surrounded by a regular granite well, with a large animal carved from pink limestone on it. Its shape, ears and legs are of an elephant, only its nose is too short, as if the sculptor found impossible to accept the existence of an animal carrying its tail on its face.

Although the statue looks old, it is just the copy of a really old one. Its original stood in the woods a kilometer away for a thousand years, until 1988, when it was transferred to the courtyard of the Archbishop’s Palace in Cordoba. Since then, a copy stand in the original place, too, but in order to boast with it not only to hikers, but also to all other visitors of the town – for example to those who come to the excellent Candil restaurant across the street –, the municipality also erected a copy here, in the main square. None of the three has any information board.

According to radiocarbon dating, the original sculpture may have been created sometime between 982 and 1193, that is, during the heyday of the Shining City. We also know its cause and function. It stood next to the Valdepuentes aqueduct, known by the Latins as Aqua Vetus or Aqua Augusta, which had supplied water to the expanding city of Corduba since the time of Emperor Augustus. The architect of the Shining City, Maslama ben Abdallah renovated this aqueduct in the 930s to provide the caliphal city with water. And not long after, Caliph Abdurrahman, or one of his high-ranking courtiers, had a pleasure garden built here, in the Valley of the Roses, which was also irrigatd by the water of the Aqua Vetus. As evidenced by the opening on its forehead and the bed of a tube carved in its temple, the elephant was the well statue of this water somewhere at a prominent point in the garden, just like the lion statues in the garden of the Alhambra.

The origins of the elephant, like most relics of al-Andalus, are enveloped in a legend that Manuel Pimentel has included in his book of legends of Medina Azahara. The legend, like the tales of the Thousand and One Nights, has a swirling structure: leaning over it, we see another legend. According to it, Maslama ben Abdallah roamed in the Sierra Morena in search of building materials for the new city of the caliph, and everywhere talked to the locals in hope for information about the materials on the site. This is how he met a hermit in the woods, a connoisseur of the traditions of the Christian world of two centuries earlier, who told him the following legend:

The Romans conquering southern Hispania, had to wage war with the Carthaginians, who regarded the region as part of their own colonial empire. To fight them with weapons equivalent to theirs, a large group of combat elephants were brought over from North Africa, and with their help they could oust the Carthaginians. Thereafter, the elephants were stationed at the headquarters of the legion at the foot of the Sierra Morena, but their feeding during in the dry and barren years put the camp’s logistical capacity to test. Eventually, the centurion in charge of the camp decided that since the Carthaginian threat was over, the elephants would have to be killed. However, their caretaker, who felt sorry for them, preferred to release them. The herd set out for the green mountains, where the head elephant stopped at a point in the valley, and turned a large rock out of the ground. From under the rock, abundant water flowed and gathered in the form of a large lake at the foot of the rocks.

Combat elephant. AD 5th-century Roman mosaic in the town of Huqoq, Galilee

The centurion was informed of the fountain, and hurried to the spot. However, he slipped at the shore of the newly formed lake, and fell into the water. His armor would have pulled him to the bottom of it, but the elephant with its snout reached after him and lifted him ashore. The centurion then ordered the elephants to receive ample provision until their deaths. An aqueduct wa built from the lake to supply the center of the province, Corduba. And in the decades that followed, the two aging males, the centurion and the elephant, were often seen walking together in the mountains above the city.

Pilate and his dog walking with Ha-Nocri until the end of times in Vladimir Bortko’s movie The Master and Margarita

On hearing the legend, Maslama ben Abdallah renovated the Roman aqueduct and led the water of the Elephant’s Well to the new city of the caliph. And when the hermit died, he had an elephant statue carved on the shores of the lake in memory of him and his story.

The original statue next to the Aqua Vetus in the 1930s

So far the legend. Its core is certainly an attempt to explain the origin of the lake accumulated near the ruins of the aqueduct. And the elephant is an Arab well statue erected after its restoration, a unique work in Muslim art which otherwise rejects sculptures and modeling living beings. However, in al-Andalus, existing in close contact with European culture, this ban softened in many cases, as we shall see later.

The wise rabbit and the Elephant King at the Moon’s Well. From the Arab animal tale collection Kalila wa Dimna, 16th century, MET

The lonely gazelle

Moorish tile with a gazelle in an Andalusian antique shop

“An anthology compiled from fragments of anthologies – that’s all we know from the poetry of al-Andalus”, writes Modest Solans Mur in his recently published volume, in which he collects the surviving Arabic poems of medieval Andalusia, and translates them in a beautiful style, addressed to the modern reader. The title of the volume, The Market Without Buyers comes from Abū Yaʿfar, who lived in 13th-century Ishbilia – today Seville –, whose ironic metaphor for poetry became a popular topos among Andalusian poets.

From the Andalusian Arab culture that flourished for eight hundred years, only fragments remain in present-day southern Spain, fragments of castles, palaces and mosques preserved by rebuilding, fragments of carvings and painted pottery, fragments of documents and poems, the remainders of a sunken Atlantis swinging on the surface of the sea. Even the most famous work, the impressive Alhambra Palace, is only a fragment of a former princely city. It is enough to let us sense the magnitude of this culture, but its details are no longer known to us.

And if we have so little left of the Arabic poetry of Andalusia, even less of the Jewish poetry in Judeo-Arabic that was born under Arabic influence in Cordoba in the 10th century, the largest Jewish city in the world at the time, which flourished in the Andalusian princely towns in the 11th and 12th centuries in the circles of poets such as Jehuda Halevi, Moses ibn Ezra or Salomon ibn Gabirol. This little was collected and translated by Peer Cole in his anthology The Dream of the Poem.

And if we know so little from Jewish poets, it is quite an exceptional coincidence that we are left with poems from a Jewish poetess as well. We know that women also wrote poems in Andalusia, and their contemporaries held these poems in high esteem, but we know only one medieval Jewish poetess, Qasmūna bint Ismāʿil – we know only her Arabic name, not the Jewish one – of whom only three poems survive. They were discovered by James Nichols in a 15th-century Arab poetic anthology by as-Suyūti from the Maghreb.

Qasmūna learned the craft from her father, Ismāʿil ibn Naghrilla, by his Jewish name Samuel ha-Nagid (993-1055), the grand vizier of the Zirid dynasty in Granada, and an acknowledged member of the Jewish poetry circle of Granada, which was presented by Ann Brener in her Judah Halevi and His Circle of Hebrew Poets in Granada. She also wrote her first surviving poem with her father. As narrated by as-Suyūti, Ismāʿil, in a playful spirit, usual among Arab poets, he recited two verses to his daughter, to be completed in the same rhythm and rhyme. The challenge was this:

Lī-ṣāḥibun dhū bahjatin qad qābalat nafʿan bi-ḍayrin wa-staḥallat jurmahā

A brilliant friend returned good with bad, considering his wickedness righteous.

To which Qasmūna promptly replied:

Ka-ššamsi min-ha-l-badru yaqbisu nūra-hu abadan wa-yaksifu baʿda ḍālika jirmahā

Just like the moon, which receives its light from the sun, but then it covers the sun with its body.

At which Ismāʿil – according to as-Suyūti, “as a madman” – jumped up, hugged his daughter, and said to her: “By the Ten Commandments, you are a greater poet than I!”

In addition to poetic greatness, a remarkable minor detail is that in 11th-century Andalusia, a woman was as aware of the nature of the eclipse, which was not so among of the erudite men in the Christian Europe of the period.

But Qasmūna’s talent, like that of other poets, was rooted in her solitude. This is what her other two surviving poems are about:

Ayā rawḍatan qad ḥāna min-ha qaṭāfu-ha wa-laisa yurā ḥānin yamudda la-ha yadā; fa-wā asafi yamdī-ššabābu muḍayyaʿan wa-yabqā-lladhī mā lanʿusammī-hi mufradā

Oh garden, the time of harvest has come but none stretches his hand to you. Alas! Youth passes and is wasted, and someone – I do not mention his name – remains alone.

In the Judeo-Arabic original, “someone” is masculine, which, according to Nichols, was a common form of hiding for a female author in Arabic poetry.

A knight chasing a gazelle in a flowery field, amidst the song of nightingales, a popular topos in Arabic love poetry. 14th-century fresco on the ceiling of the Alhambra’s royal banquet hall

And the third one, the most beautiful, most original and most touching, centered on a widespread topos in Arabic poetry, the gazelle symbolizing a beautiful woman. However, while male poets describe the gazelle from the outside, as the object of their desire, Qasmūna identifies with her, and shows how the gazelle sees herself.

Yā ẓabyatan tarʿa bi-rawdin dāʿiman innī ḥakaitu-ki fi-ttawaḥḥuši wa-l-ḥawari. Amsā kilā-nā mufradan ʿan ṣāḥibin fa-ʿitābu-nā abadan ʿalā ḥukmi-l-qadar.

Oh gazelle, always grazing here in this garden you are wild and bright black-eyed, like me and both of us lonely, forsaken: patiently bearing our fate’s decree.

Nasrid-era hand-painted, gilded vase from the Alhambra, with the gazelles chosen as the emblem of the palace

Memento

Nei primi giorni dell’anno 2020 (-21) un virus sconosciuto proveniente dalla Cina semina disagi e tanti morti in tutto il mondo. Anche il Palio di luglio e di agosto non fu corso. Questa pietra vuole ricordare questo brutto evento. Siena 2020

In the first days of the year of 2020 (-21), an unknown virus coming from China is spreading sickness and so many deaths worldwide. Even the Palio of July and August was not run. This stone wants to remember this ugly event. Siena 2020

 
Any Italian knows, with the experience of three thousand years, how to cope with social trauma: put up a memorial stone to it! And one man of Siena knows how to make clear the severity of the trauma: Even the Palio of July and August was not run!!! Nothing like this has happened since the victory of Montaperti over the Florentines in 1260.

The plaque is on the wall of Vicolo della Fortuna 9, in the Jewish neighborhood, the Panther contrada, one of Siena’s seventeen traditional districts whose riding teams test their skills year after year in a horse race to commemorate the victory of Montaperti. The coats of arms on the plaque also emphasize the excellence of the Panther contrada and the unity of Siena.


Above the door of the workshop under the plaque, the coats of arms follow each other in reverse order: first the symbols of Siena, then the crowned panther. Marble restorer Emilio Frati is a local patriot, but a world citizen. During more than fifty years of work, he has been involved in the restoration of a number of outstanding monuments, including – overcoming Montaperti – the Cathedral of Florence, but now he has been working on the Siena cathedral for several years. He scrolls through the photo album The marble floor of the Siena Cathedral. “I restored this, and also this…”


In his workshop, beside the copies of the restored medieval monuments on many different scales, he also offers modern themes, still lifes, Siena souvenirs, and stone inlays of famous football players.




“Why did you put up this plaque?” “Because I think this was one of the most influential events of recent years, but we do not have any collective monument to it. Look, WWI had forty million victims. They have a monument in every single village, recalling their names, one by one. The ensuing Spanish flu had one hundred million of casualties, but if the press had not brought their memory back during the current epidemic, no one would know about them. Siena was the city hardest hit by the black death of 1348-1349 in Europe. It is fitting that at least here we should have a memorial plaque to the black death of 2020-2021.”