Romans, Water Cults, Ancient Worship

The Romans found good reason to penetrate the western interior of southern Sardinia, a region ten times older than the alps, whose mountains emerged from the sea about 600 million years ago. Lead, zinc and silver drew them, like the Carthaginians before them and the Pisans after. Today the region is littered with abandoned mining facilities, majestic 19th c. monsters.

In the solitude of the Valley of Antas is a hint of the Romans who lived there. A temple has been reconstructed to some of its Roman glory, built on top of a crude stone temple of the Carthaginians that dated back to 500 BC. Its deity was called Sid Addir Babai, a father god who was distinctly Sardinian. The Roman temple constructed later was dedicated to Sardus Pater Babay, and then reconstructed under the Emperor Caracalla in the 3rd c. AD. It continued the preexisting Nuragic cult to the great idol of the water and vegation and father universal, the proto-Sard name Babay meaning father. A bronzetti found in a nearby grave is believed to be the deity, but the statue that stood in the temple was monumental. The temple of heavy tan stone columns with Roman capitals looms over herds of sheep clanking and echoing across the valley, as they feed along the facets of its hills.

Grotto di San Giovanni

Nearby we visited the Grotto di San Giovanni, entering past remnants of a pre-nuragic wall that protected its ancient habitations to a swelling chorus of pigeons, their cooing and gulping echoing in that pre-Cambrian cathedral of stalactites. The chorus died down to the whirring of wings and squeaking of bats as we walked through the 850 meters. An old dog barked at us from a side passage at the other end, where we emerged to a sweet forest of delicate oaks. A sign in Italian told us that this wood is not our heritage but is borrowed from our children.

San Salvatore

On another day we drove in search of a church called San Salvatore, following a sign that took us off the obscure two way rural road to a not-quite-village of squat cement blocks for houses, that was said to have been used in some spaghetti westerns, but even that was hard to believe. We drove through narrow alleys between perilous cement walls past a group of men gathered like rough cowboys, till we noticed that some of the small doorways had fine mahogany doors with brass heads for door knockers. A dog wandered in and out through a beaded curtain of one house. In the center of the square, marked by nothing but the iron outline of a small cross, was a tiny country church, 17th c, simple and rural. Inside a bright-eyed functionnaire sat under the wooden eaves. He motioned us down a stone stairway in the center of the nave.

San Salvatore

Below were about six bare stone rooms, one with a primitive stone altar, several with wells or cisterns. The walls seemed smeared with traces of paint amidst the lichen, and were shaped in rough arches. There were remnants of drawings that had a Greek character, but it was impossible to tell when they had been drawn. Some were of primitive animals, one a gorgeous leopard with a forked tail, some beautiful muses.

This crypt had been used for water cults since Nuraghic times, then by Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans and Christians. The larger well had the heavy cylindrical shape we had seen of a Paleo-Christian well in Cagliari. The subterranean temple had been dedicated to Mars and Venus about 300 BC. and had been in most or less continuous use, except for a brief Islamic period. The pagan cult of the divine savior became the Christian cult of San Salvatore, its life far longer than the church above it.

San Salvatore

San Salvatore

Crypt of a Cagliari church

We saw wells that had been constructed all over Sardinia in the Nuraghic and pre-Nuraghic times for water worship. And there were churches in Cagliari with crypts below that had wells, in long use that sometimes predated Christianity and its own fish symbol.