The enigmatic "Mosque" of Cordoba
The most unusual thing about La Mezquita, as it is known - "The Mosque" - is that it contains Cordoba's Cathedral. What one sees from outside is, at first and even at second sight, confusing: a huge, flat-roofed low-lying squarish building with a gigantic Classical church jutting up in the middle, like a rather unsightly wedding-cake.
But before joining the well-meaning chorus which bemoans this Christian crime against Moorish art (which, undoubtedly, it is), consider the chequered and equally "criminal" past of the sacred place, from the very beginning. It will also give you an idea of Cordoba's role in Spanish history.
First, the Romans built a pagan temple on the site. After the fall of the Roman Empire, the new Germanic masters of Spain (the Visigoths) replaced it with the church of Saint Vincent. When the Arabs conquered the peninsula several hundred years later, they tore down the church and began building their mosque, which - commensurate with Cordoba's importance as the centre of Muslim power in Spain - became the largest, or one of the largest, in all of Islam.
When the Christians reconquered Cordoba in 1236, after an absence of 500 years, they did with the mosque what they did with others they found all over Andalucia. Instead of building a new cathedral from scratch, they simply "converted" the Muslim temple to Christianity. This began by "nailing a cross on the roof", as they said at the time, and later setting up an altar and pulpit surrounded with the appropriate adornments. King Alfonso X used Cordoba's Moorish craftsmen to create the city's first Christian temple in the mudéjar, or "Mauresque" manner, mixed with the Gothic which was the European style of the day. This smallish but precious church, half-eclipsed by the current Cathedral, is known as the Capilla de Villaviciosa.
Another several hundred years later, the Catholic Monarchs built a larger and more modern church in the Mezquita, which was in turn replaced a century later by a full-fledged Cathedral in the Renaissance - and later, Baroque - style. The result is the strange hybrid which we now see, with its ornately carved altar and choir, made entirely of mahogany brought from America, and its soaring Classical arches, standing in the middle of the old prayer hall of the Muslims.
The original mosque was permeated all around with open arches, so that the sunlight could flood in, leading the worshipper to the shadows of the central area as a symbol of his mystical journey towards Allah. But the Christians, being less inclined towards letting in the natural elements, plugged up most of the openings and installed, in their place, chapels dedicated to the various saints. This explains the rather oppressive darkness of the place, by comparison with what it must have been like in Moorish times.
The minaret was left standing, but it did not fare as well as Seville's Giralda, which was simply capped with a bell-tower. Instead, it was used as the central core of a new, monumentally-designed sheath. If you get the chance to climb the inner ramp to the top, you will see the sealed-up arches and windows of the Moorish original. In fact, it is a tower within a tower.
As in Seville, the Patio de los Naranjos (Courtyard of the Orange Trees), where the worshippers washed at the fountain before going in to pray, has survived as a sort of cloister. But the other mosques which were Christianized after the Reconquest - such as the cathedrals of Seville and Granada - were eventually torn down to make way for "real" churches. Amazingly, the Cordoba contraption was spared because the people of the city, even in those intolerant times, were aware of its special grandeur and beauty. An indication of this grass-roots affection for the great pile is still alive today: the people of Cordoba do not say "I went to Mass at the Cathedral", but "I went to Mass at the Mosque". It is a contradiction which could only seem "natural" in Spain.
Embedded in the wall closest to the river is a sort of octagonal alcove surrounded with high, arched windows, and richly adorned with mosaics. This veritable jewel-box is the mihrab, the heart of all mosques, because it shows the worshippers the direction of Mecca.
Cordoba's privileged position on the upper reaches of the Guadalquivir River - giving it access to the deepest hinterland of Andalucia with its production of olive oil and grain - made it grow, and the mosque with it. With the four separate enlargements it underwent, the Mezquita took 200 years to complete, the last and largest of which was carried out by the legendary military leader Al-Mansur. By that time, it had grown to five times its original size, which sounds improbable but was in fact technically simple. With a construction which was flat and low, and "modular" in design, one merely had to add on more rows of columns to support more shed-like roofs. At completion, 20,000 praying men could prostrate themselves among its pillars.
Al-Mansur was a great warrior and the terror of the Christians, but he lacked the finesse of Cordoba's previous rulers. The final enlargement directed by him was, compared to the rest, done in a hurry and on the cheap, with only additional space in mind. For one thing, it required extending one end of the quibla - the wall which the faithful faced when praying - which left the mihrab to one side of the center, destroying the perfect balance of the ensemble. Worse still, while the earlier arches had been painstakingly composed of alternating segments of limestone and bricks, creating their marvellous yellow-and-red candy-cane pattern, the short-cut was taken of doing them all in limestone and then painting on the red stripes, as can be seen when you stand close enough.
Since the Middle Ages, visitors have been fascinated by the forest of 850 columns which supports the roof. But they were taken from other buildings - some from the Church of Saint Vincent which had previously occupied the site, others from Roman and Visigothic palaces in the city. And when there were no more to be found, the Arabs made their own.
But not all of the columns the architects found were of the required heights. To shorten those which were too long, the Moors buried the bases in the floor, which was easier than cutting them. But to compensate for the shortness of those which were not high enough, they set upon their finely carved capitels rectangular pillars, giving them an extra few meters. On their own, these extensions would have been unsightly to say the least, and wobbly too. But the Moors ingeniously braced them horizontally against their neighbours with one level of arches, and then joined them once more at the top with another series of arches which supported the roof.
It is believed that when the Moorish architects created this truly celestial device, they were inspired by the undulating, multi-tiered design of a Roman aqueduct they had seen in western Spain. But however practical may have been the purpose, or prosaic the source, of these upwardly rippling waves of masonry, they are admired today as the Mezquita's universally recognized symbol, and its most dazzling effect.
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