Museums of Girone: Art and the Jews

Early Romanesque crucifix

Girone's Art Museum, housed in a 10th c. abbott's mansion that looks like a fortress, tells a clear story from the primitive beginnings of Romanesque art. The early Romanesque was as stylized as Byzantine art, even anti-anatomical--for example, on his crucifix Christ stands fully clothed and wide-eyed.

Unlike Madrid, medieval Catalunya had little exposure to artistic trends of Europe, so a slow trickle of European influence becomes evident only with the gothic style, which gradually took on volume and depth. Alabaster madonnas look almost French, and the beautiful expressiveness of the local artists is unique.

Gothic alabaster monk

But the retables (large altar montages of sacred painting) have a genius of their own, with their brilliant storytelling. There is St. Feliu's martyrdom, with his boyish face and sardonic superiority, St. Catherine, sweet and wide-eyed undergoing terrible tortures, St. Esteve being squirted in the eye wit the Virgin's breast milk, all with a special expressivity rarely seen in the Louvre. Even the Baroque, in its painted statues, shows the strong Catalan character. The late academic painting had perfection without that Catalunyan exuberance, beautiful but not as driven by this gorgeous land.

A mere three staff members observed us through closed circuit tv, and then afterwards recommended the nearby restaurant housed in a gothic priory. Next to it was a walled-in garden. On our way to the museum through the Jewish quarter we had seen men of different colors and states of dress entering furtively--the medieval garden must have been a soup kitchen.

Among St. Catherine's trials

The restaurant was a vaulted space and served reasonably priced excellent Catalan fare. My tortilla (omelette) was a bread-like brown (from the eggplant) and deeply flavorful, as was the ratatouille-flavored rice and squid with caramelized onion.

Italian influence of volume

And then we returned to the Calle to visit the Jewish museum. Among the scattered stories told in Catalunya, the best articulated seems to be that of the Spanish Jews who were driven out in 1492 by Isabelle and Ferdinand. Like the Parisian museum of Jewish Art and Culture, this one told stories with medieval illuminations and a few artifacts, recounting the happy memories of the bustling neighborhood, albeit with the occasional massacre. It is housed in a former synagogue and details the considerable contributions made by Jews: intellectual, financial, artisanal, and scholarly. In fact, faced with conversion or exile, many of Girone's Jews chose conversion, though that was not true of another Jewish quarter we visited in Besalu, where the Jews were closed off, under a hot sun, as early as 1415 and eventually fled. The exhibitions gave evidence that Jewish women, despite their cultural constraints, had traded and bought and sold and participated in a busy society.

St. Feliu visited in prison by angels

A migraine struck me full force and I went out to the garden and sat at its edge, where a corridor of coolness seeped up from adjoining leafy galleries, and where the voices of neighbors were so loud and expressive I thought I'd stumbled across a theatical performance.

The next day, in Besalu, we saw an old Miqvah, the Jewish ritual bath, of which none remain in Girone. It had been authenticated by a rabbi from Perpignan, and another from Paris! But all was closed off--celebrated as an historical city, Besalu still does not open its buildings except to its own guided tours. Though we waited in the heat for a tour in Spanish, the guide said it was too hot for her to go out only for 2 people!

Baroque St. Roca

Sant Pere de Rhodes

Sant Pere de Rhodes in Cap de Creus

Just over the Pyrenee Mountains is France, some 20 km from our route through the wild region called Cap de Creus, Cape of the Cross, named for pilgrims who traveled winding roads on the pilgrimage to St. Jacques de Compostella. There are areas of the Pyrenees that are still impassable, others whose hospices have welcomed travelers for 1,000 years. The roads of the Pyrenees have been controlled by kings, bandits, smugglers and they were the roads that more than 470,000 refugees took to France at the end of the Spanish Civil War. We passed through Vilajuiga, which sheltered refugees--the hotel was set up for children, organized by the Ministry of Justice of the Republic, which would be defeated. The last airplanes flew from here during the retreat on 6 Feb 1939 as the almost half million Republicans fled.

St, Creu

At the top of Cap de Creus is St. Pere de Rhodes, once a powerful monastery along the pilgrimage road, atop a lofty crop of high rock with a stupendous blue view. Above the hazy sea its pathways are still revered, a starting point to St. Jacques de Compostella. We climbed through the crumbled church of the ruins of St. Creu, a medieval village, its sturdy arch portal still graceful, then to St. Pere.

There had been a building there in the 6th c., and then a monastic cell in the 9th c., disputed between two abbeys. But in the 10th c. a noble called Tasi and Count Gausfred of Empuries donated land and received privileges from the popes and Frankish kings of Charlemagne's empire, creating an abbey in 944, built on the model of a Roman temple. It reached its peak of power in 12th-13th c., one of the most important centres of spiritual, political and economic power of the day.

Sant Pere

The church has a very high and narrow nave with monumental Corinthian columns dominating in double rows on either side. Below is the original crypt with convoluted low arches, above is an ambulatory with brief remnants of bright murals in a wide-eyed primitive Romanesque style. Christ on the cross is fully dressed, his eyes staring stoically.

Christ on the cross

Much restored, Sant Pere's beauty is severe, as were the Benedictine monks. Twenty or so lived here at a time in a common room. A lower cloister with short columns was their gathering place, but an upper cloister was built, higher with more of the immaculate sky. By the 16th-17th c the monks had begun to build individual quarters high up in the upper ambulatory, which ambles into one of the three square towes which had become private chapels over the sea. Though it was a place of pilgrimage, the Benedictine order forbade much contact with the world and the complicated stone rooms seem like dungeons despite their lofty exposure to the sea and sky.

Frieze of Christ appearing to his disciples

The monastery was looted repeatedly so only tiniest fragments of its character remain: Christ appears to his disciples in a stone frieze, very fierce and Spanish faces; in the carving of the Corinthian columns, and remnants of color that once covered the walls.

We had a run-in with the maitre-d' of the restaurant and walked out, starving, to descend to our car and gobble up our huge peaches.

Inner monastery

Then we drove down winding roads to Port de la Selva, white and slate like Cadaques but less magical, where I had an outstanding golden grilled dorade with Catolonian ragout served by a sullen senora. We drove out on a serpentine and precipitous road at the very edge of the rock over the sea and beach which consisted wrinkled boulders beaten by foam.

Goats of Cap Creu

We could see a hillside covered with multicolored slabs in haphazard arrangements and wondered if it was a ravaged graveyward. Pulling up, we saw they were goats--some 50 of them gobbling up the hillside of the Cap Creu natural preserve, big rams on their hind legs chewing on tree branches, curious kids with their delicate limbs and unfazed stared, the curious bland regard of goats moving around us, uninterested in our presence. Every so often two black dogs would rush into their midst and drive them across the road, bleating, all graceful sleek limbs and horns, with full udders or full stesticles. They complained about the dogs to us but hurried along. Finally the goatherd appeared, staunch and brown with a wicker bottle and a staff, much less endeared by the lovely creatures then we were.

We took the long roads, serpentine and straight under a hazy sky, home. And then we swam, alone on the beach at 7pm. We plunged into the dark green blue waters, satiny and briney above marine forests.

Roses and Cadaques

The Citadel at Roses

Roses was once called Rhodes after the 8th c. BC Greeks of Rhodes, its legendary founders. It is more certain that in the 4th c. BC, the Greeks of Marseilles came. There they found the Iberians, whose continuing presence was marked by prehistoric caves and chalcolithic tools, megaliths from 3rd millennium BC and communities in loose connection. What you can see now is a large walled area, called the Citadel, which had been Iberian, Greek, Roman, Benedictine and had fought against Napoleon.

The Greeks brought goods from Marseilles, Ibizza and elsewhere in the Mediterranean, set up kilns for a ceramic industry in their city now only partly excavated. They brought Demeter and they brought lively clay beads from all the ports of the Mediterranean including Africa. And then, via Empuries, came the Romans with armaments, dislodging other forms of culture. The water's edge had cut well into the what is now the walled citadel, and an elaborate Roman house had stood at its lapping shore, near the fish factory for salting tuna and dolphin for export.

The townspeople rebelled against the Romans during the Punic wars and were driven out by Cato in 195 AD. Gradually the fishing industry rebuilt the settlement which was thriving in 4th c AD, even as Rome declined. But its importance was usurped by neighboring cities and it emptied out till the Benedictine order came to set up manufactures and a monastary in 10th c AD.

The exquisite Romanesque Santa Maria of Lombard archiecture joined to the defensive walls, was kept locked at night by the abbot. Now the church with its perfect vaults of circling stones is open to the sky, jagged remains of its soaring nave against bright blue, its multicolored brick arches a shell against the elements.

Arsenal

The Benedictine Abby had thrived and influenced the region so that in the 14-16th c new walls were built. The citadel became a military base and boatbuilding arsenal remembered by gigantic rusted anchors, important enough to be partially destroyed by Napoleon's troops. Little remains of all this except for stone foundations of the medieval hospital and street of houses, a small fortress-like foundation of the governor's house, and massive outter walls.

Cadaques

We walked the ramparts but many centuries' cities still lie beneath the grass. We had lunch at a cheap little seaside place filled with teenagers, where salmon and dill is pressed between hamburger buns. Then we drove in the full sun up a winding tiny, treacherous well-trafficked road and down agains to exquisite Cadaques, a pure white village clustered in an indigo sheltered harbor, whose church rides the village as if surging on a wave.

Dali, Picasso--they were all here, owned summer houses, roamed the vertical slate pathways winding among bright white and tile roofs, or the beaches, the two separated by a jetty, one side shaded against the open sea with tiny artisanal cafes over the water, the other an active beach with more extroverted but still quirky cafes. The church has a Dali painting in its high plain vaults, and an exuberant gold-painted retable of Spanish earthiness and Baroque fanfare. Someone started playing the elegant organ. We couldn't help but linger in the charismatic church but then wandered the port, exhausting me till I sat at water's edge.

Empuries - Greek colony, Roman city, Medieval center

To feel the succession of centuries, the Iberic promontories where Greeks arrived to live among the original Spaniards and shape their culture, and to trade around the Mediterranean and bring gods and goods, you go to Empuries (from Emporia, the Greek colony named for its brisk marketplace).

We parked under trees next to the unearthing of a Roman metal factory that had been a Greek necropolis many centuries previous (9th c. BC). That was when Iberians had lived on a little nearby peninsula (now the village of Sant Marti), as had other Iberians in scattered groups on the neighboring headlands and on hills among the marshes. They traded with Etruscans, Phoenicians and Greeks, the latter of whom came from Phocaea (in Anatolia, via their settlement in Marseille) to settle among the Iberians in the 7th c BC, and a century later to establish Neapolis, the new city.

The temple quarters of Neapolis

The ruins of Neapolis lie under the hot sun at the edge of the Mediterranean which beats this shore with special force, its waves thundering audibly beyond the graceful pines leaning along these less refined beaches.

It has been said that when the Phocaeans were setting sail they heard a voice which told them to name as head of their expedition the man chosen by the Goddess Artemis of Ephesus, whither they sailed. One day, Aristarche, one of the most respected women in Ephesus, had dreams in which she saw the Goddess standing in front of her telling her to embark with the Phocaeans. The colonists carried out this command and, when they reached the end of their expedition, they built the sanctuary and bestowed the highest honors on Aristarche by making her a priestess. In all the colonies of Massalia, Artemis is venerated above all other deities.

Asclepius found in Neapolis

Following Artemis, came gentler gods for the households, Demeter and Egyptian phallic Bez. But the coast was unhealthy so Asclepius, god of healing, became the next deity. His larger than life statue was found in the imposing temple quarter you first encounter. Then you encounter the Greek and Italic houses of 2 stone rooms and workshops, sometimes clustered around a courtyard with a rainwater cistern.

The Greek settlement, closer to the sea, has the disciplined structure of Roman cities, but now all that remains are waist high reddish rock ruins, once one of Greece's main outposts in Northern Spain. One house was destined to hold banquets (symposia) for free men. At the entrance to the room is a Greek inscription which has been translated as "How sweet it is to be reclined."

Symposium

A sanctuary was dedicated to Isis and to Serapis, Egyptian divinities linked to medicine, housed in a large area with porticoes. The temple was built over a previously porticoed space that was a gymnasium from the Hellenistic period (2nd c. BC).

Then we walked among the piney, sweet dunes along the beaches of rock and less golden sand, along the enormous Greek stone jetty which remains, to the original Iberian settlement, now a small medieval rise of stone buildings (mainly restaurants to feed Greco-Roman fans from Empuries) on the promontory to which the remnants of the population had retreated as Empuries ceded its importance to Rhodes and Gerunda after 1 AD. We ate suquet, a slow-cooked savory bouillabaise-like seafood stew, served by a hardworking sweet-faced blonde, near the waves the pounded the soft beach while children slipped away from their lunch tables to roll in the sand.

Roman ruins

In 218 the Roman General Scipio the African landed on the promontory, to cut off the Carthaginian rearguard, as Hannibal of Carthage was marching his elephants around Spain. As in Sicily and Sardinia, the Romans waged their Punic wars over the homes of the Iberians, who resisted them, but romanisation was an irresistible force. The Romans set up a permanent encampment north of the Greek village, which became Municipium Empuriae, an imposing Roman city, in the 1st c. BC. With the paving of streets and temples to Roman gods, the Iberians became assimilated, and the culture eliminated.

Roman mosaics

The Roman city, across soothing gardens of poplar, lavendar and grasses, in the velvet unearthly shade of oaks, elms and pines, had monumental homes built around courtyards, with mosaic floors of surreal geometric patterns.

Roman room

There is an enormous reconstruction of a tiny section of the forum's portico, feels massive, the tonnage hauled feels punishing, though we see little today but the waist-high rock rubble. Aristocratic homes had towered here, and the forum on a giant's scale had had numerous temple and the Basilica, composed of administrative buildings.

Small reconstructed section of Forum portico

Along the north-south cardio maximus, just beyond the massive and ugly wall (topped with blackening concrete--Romans had just invented it) was the amphitheatre, little left but a perfect round foundation to remember its cruelty. It was built in the 1st c. AD outside the city walls and was typical of the architecture where gladiators fought each other or wild beasts. The now vanished wooden seats could hold 3,300 spectators. I stood in the center and imagined myself a gladiator facing all but certain death, with a heart full of stoic Roman bravado. A large penis was clearly incised at the gateway, for luck and prosperity.

Good luck phallus

We walked on the wall and realized it was hollow, for its ceiling had crumbled in places. At a small window opening into an enclosed room a gray tabby cat gazed at me calmly, till her tiny ones began tumbling and mewing in the wall enclosure. She rose to take her stand, hissing and yowling at Jacques who towered above her.

Nearby is the medieval city of Castello d'Empuries, celebrated with Catalan banners hanging over narrow stone streets, we found the Cathedral of Sta. Maria open, monumental with a huge square bell tower of several stories with gothic windows split by gothic columns. But the blackening stone had no grace. Inside, the enormous gothic fault had been renovated, but the 15th c. alabaster retable was lively as German gothic, with broad faced angels.

Cathedral Santa Maria

The most beautiful aspect was the portal of fierce-faced apostles, 15th c., whose glares, Jacques remarked, would never be found on a French church. But, lively and arresting, they defied us across the centuries, while pigeons kissed Mary's face as they courted each other, and hefty Germans sketched them over beer from their cafe tables.

Girone and Montgris

On el Calle

Leisurely, lovely Girone, built on Roman walls of the then Gerundra, is the cultural center. We wandered the old city on La Rambla, the old stone road, but the most beautiful steets belonged to the Jews from the 9th c to 1492.  Nobby gold-red stone. closely fitted houses of Catalan balconies and winding low steps up through the dark but immaculate quarter of low arched wooden doors, and its memories of distinguished Jews whose names also appeared on the fine metalwork in the Cathedral.

Jacob wrestling with the Angel, Cathedral cloister

The winding Calle (Jewish quarter) leads up to the Cathedral, flat pale and bulky with a Baroque facade of big white saints, but on one side an intricate fold of a Romanesque-gothic arch hints at the missing statues all torn away. Inside is an enormous dark gothic vault, mighty and stern, with a three-nave choir, but an immense single nave of chapels, mostly baroque. The 12th c. cloister is exquisite, with carved stone columns from Bible stories and mythical beasts, and Charlemagne's throne.

Jewish Calle

Girone calls itself the city of Charlemagne, once having been a major Roman city, Gerunda, trapezoidal like the cloister which buttresses the Cathedral and the ramparts of the old 12th c. city. Charlemagne brought his itinerant court there and established the Spanish Marches, the outlying sections of his empire, that he had wrested from the Moors. We wandered around the bulky Cathedral which meant taking labyrinthine streets, and after lunch walked up among pines and stone battlements to descend to the so-called Arab baths, a Romanesque reconstruction of Roman baths with Moorish touches and Romanesque capitals of grace. In the successive rooms are the classic frigidarium, tepidarium, the various stages of hot and cold that Romans enjoyed in their baths, including massage. 

Cloister of Sant Pere Galligant

Then we visited the Monastery of Sant Pere Galligant and, with expanding relief, entered the portal with its flying horses and its strange rose made of small columns in a wheel, little Romanesque figures of the abbot and his monks. The majestic interior silenced us with the authority and beauty of its perfect Romanesque vaults. The walls were stone vestiges of the Roman city that had preceded it. The simple cloister was surrounded by sarcophagi, including a celebrated tomb with the seasons portrayed as busy cherubs. The church doubles as the archeological museum, and in the upper rooms were stones and flinty instruments and panels of neolithic and paleolithic and iron age Spaniards becoming Romanized, with the complete erasure of the Iberic culture.

Sant Pere de Galligant, 11th c.

Montgris (on the right)

Torroella de Montgris is a medieval town buried deeply in narrow checkerboard blocks till you get to the stone palaces tucked around a few still lovely squares. Then you uncover wealth and Spanish elegance in the half disks of highly polished wood doors, gardens and grillwork and stone stairs leading to stained glass windows. We ate an amazingly good lunch of salads (hot chevre on a bed of exquisite green and walnuts) at 5pm and inquired about the castle of Montgris, visible from miles around. We drove to the industrial edge of the city and on baked earth and scrubby bushes and succulents we began the gravelly and then boulder climb up the massive granite col. 

Kids imitating dad in Toroella de Montgris

Difficult footing and vertical stretches lead you past empty stone chapels and glimpses of the castle. Exuberant Germans, a Spanish family of overweight parents climbing with staffs and their topless 7-yr old daughter, fierce-eyed and nostriles flaring. The castle was never finished. It remains a monumental rectangle with towers you can climb for the magnificent smoky distances. A light rain cooled us. 

Climbing Montgris

Downwards I led, following green arrows precipitously in vertical, blind descents (J fell once) that led to the hidden recesses of a cavee, splashed in black rose travertine and smelling of smoke, with rapelling gear drilled into its ceiling. It is called Cau del Duc, and had been inhabited 300,000 years ago.

glimpse of the castle

View from the castle

11th c. castle of Montgris

Cau del Duc

Traveling Back in Time

St. Elm

Disturbing the sea gulls

My morning jogs took me up a steep, hot climb to the St. Elm monastary, guardian of travelers, sailors and merchants. Its strategic fortification had defended the Sant Feliu coast since the 15th c. It was here the name of Costa Brava was adopted by the writer Ferran Aguilo.  The route was in scattered feathery pine shade past ruined hotels with Moorish cupolas. But the trip down takes only a few minutes, flinging my steps down the sea views. The screaming and whining and barking of sea gulls has become melodious, like babies' cries or Puerto Rican dancers, their muscular white flight just above our heads. There is a lone promontory where sea gulls roost, a piney place, sticky with sharp resin and redolent of woodsmoke, over a giant slab of wrinkled rock thick with gulls.

We embarked on Catalan history. The busy city of Bisbal d'Emporda, a name that means the Bishop's place at the market, has several castles. One is now owned by a Dutch hotellier, a lovely 14th c. stone castle where we picked the figs off the ground under the tree and ate them till we realized that in the heat that they had become alcoholic. But we were at the wrong castle.

The Bishop's Palace, 11th c.

So I drove back along an esplanade of 100-year old sycamores to a packed parking lot where I edged between two trees on the dirt, and in to the the overflowing market that seeped into every medieval corner of Bisbal d'Emporda and obscured the 18th c. Baroque church. We wound around the tables of underpants, bikinis, men's underwear 5 for 1 euro, families of different colors including dark black, vegetables, jellabahs and burkas to find the Castell we sought, it too obscured by the market. But its stone is older, staunch, distinct. And what's more, it told stories.

Catalans, the last anarchists

It had been a pied a terre for the Bishop in Girona, while off season its square rooms saw the preparation of wine inside the barren walls. But when the bishop came to town, he brought his own tapestries that covered the walls and his own grand furniture. The castle told the story of the region and its civil wars. The 14th c. plague had so reduced the population and the peasants' output, that feudal lords had pressed the peasants ever more cruelly, extracting impossible harvests and trapping them on the land, till they revolted, abetted by the king. More than one bloody century ensued. On the winemaking ground floor we heard the words of a wealthy peasant, from his own journal, who had undertaken an emissary role to bring peace to the region, which finally resulted in the peasants' freedom to leave their land. In each castle room, a mirror became the ghostly hologram of an actor as a town crier, a tailor, a soldier, a cook, all describing their life in the castell. While the Bishop was a feudal lord, he bestowed blessings on the people of Emporda, despite the heavy hand of justice in those centuries of civil war. Pondering the centuries of hardship, we dined on black rice and seafood, which is a kind of paella with a nubbly spicy rice base, in the shadow of the Castell.

San Pere, Ullatret, 10th c.

An earlier history is told at Ullastret, which we reached via beautiful winding country roads along cliffs and gorges of olives and pines and leafy greenery, verdant for the Mediterranean. We drove against a flow of serious Sunday cyclists in team shirts who were also filling the cafe's we passed, under acacias and willows, calling out group orders.

Sant Pere

Early decor, Sant Pere

We reached the medieval town of Ullastret and encircled the old 12th c walls of red dusty stone where the Carcen - prison- was labelled at the bottom of a tower. We stared longingly at the 12th c. church with its crumbling stone and brick facade and wired bells in the flat cloche. The guardian opened the church for us, for there might be a baptism later, he said, and we inhaled its pure beauty. It is medicinal, he said, the pure architecture of this Romanesque. He explained in rapid Spanish or Catalan and I smiled politely, but little explanation was needed for the small but luminous absides, the slightly irregular arces of the chapels, the remants of Romanesque carving on hih colunns, the blessing and clarity of the vaults, told their own stories. We wandered around as the church slowly filled with Spanish sightseers, families equally stuned by the purity of the architecture. Then we drove a km to the oppidum, or pobla (settlement) of Ullastret and parked on grass under trees.

silos and cisterns, Ullastret, 4th BC

The 6th c. BC settlement was the the largest of this Iberic tribe - Indikens. They made this their capital and developed an architectural complex of a fortified town with towers, aristocratic homes and shops, silos and cisterns, temples and defenses, that controlled the region. This was the first historical culture of Catalunya, with a writing system that has not so far been translated. Preceding them had been sporadic human settlement, which became continuous towards the end of the 7th c. BC. In the 6th c. BC the Greeks had come to trade and fish, and had lived with the Iberians. Artifacts have been found from other nearby indigenous communities, as well as Greek and Phoenician towns. There were Greek ceramics and the simpler, local imitations, iron instruments (the invaders came for raw materials) and jewelry imported from or influenced by the Greek colonies of Empuries and Rhodes and some from the Carthaginian colonies further south. Finally the Romans arrived in 218 BC, on the warpath after the Carthaginians as Hannibal marched his elephants around Spain, and the culture was eventually annhilated.

A mansion in Ullastret

The Greeks had catalyzed the Iberian culture itself--it is suggested that without them, the Iberians would not have developed. Their religious beliefs absorbed Grecian and later Roman influences, but some death cults remained distinct. There was a cult of the skull, shared with Languedoc and the greater region. Skulls have been found with metal rods driven through them, near the iron tools of execution, now rusted to wormy looking rods. These peoples cremated their dead, but bodies of infants were buried whole, some near religious sites, suggesting infant sacrifice. Even after their flight from the Romans, coins found on the site indicated continued cult practices among the abandoned walls.