Sant' Antiocho

Far from being the sunny, idyllic fishing village the guidebook promises, Sant' Antiocho seemed gray, the waters swampy.

The day turned gloomy. The famous Basilica with its catacombs was closed (naturally) till 5. A woman came over to the car to explain all this in a kind of dialect, and then she waved at me with a giant friendly welcome. We drove down the close, spiraling streets along countless closed stores and found a slightly more appealing café (than where we had desperately taken an espresso amid video machines and loud workers). This one was also alongside the waters swamped with something that looked like industrial waste. We had salad and sandwiches among the few customers. An old gray woman in a large scarf came in, touched me on the shoulder and then touched a man at the next table, who greeted her with a big smile. She sat at a table behind us and took off her scarf, her dolorous narrow face with its long nose draped in gray hair. When I turned back to smile at her her eyes swiveled sideways, as if she didn't want to be noticed. After we left I saw her leave the restaurant too, putting on her large scarf.

Tophet

We went to the archeological museum and bought 4-in1 tickets for 13 euros, and were plunked down in front of a 4-screen video (an echo of the four quarters of the Sardinian flag that is 4 times the Corsican flag) that raved about Sardinia with very little relevance to the museum. Then we wandered through the rooms of relics retrieved from the nearby Phoenician and Carthaginian necropolis, which includes two tophets.

Tophets are usually thought of in connection with the Carthaginian rite of child sacrifice (controversial among historians), with urns of ashes from infant bodies. But here they are called graveyards of stillborn or infants who died very young. We keep seeing this explanation, keep wondering if we have been brainwashed by the Old Testament to hate the worshippers of Baal. Or do the Sardinians insist on sanitizing the origins of Western culture on their island? They clearly differentiate between Phoenician culture, which came from Lebanon, and the Punic, or the Phoenician North African colony of Carthage which they say was more "African.'" And why do these sacred tophets feel so unpleasant? Is it just my suggestibility? We walked up to a tophet, a windy grave of spiraling pines, a wind that sounded like the stillness of death. Little clay pots were strewn everywhere. Originally they had been tucked into niches in the tufaceous rock.

Now I am sitting at the Basilica, waiting for it to open and waiting for Jacques who is trying to establish why we have paid for 4 tours when 2 of them are closed. Across the cobbled street a lady in her bathrobe comes out of her house. Children are emerging from the church, dragged by harried mothers. Do we want to see yet another Punic necropolis, I wonder. And the fortress tower, which the Savoy rulers in Cagliari had told the townspeople to build at their own expense in 1814 as protection against the Barbary pirates? Ten pirate ships arrived from Tunisia and the few dozen defenders took to the tower and were killed. The pirates were pleased to make off with 158 white slaves, including some half-dressed women. Do we want to look at those bare stones?

Basilica St. Antiochus

The hour has struck for the Basilica to open.

The Basilica has the simplest of Romanesque interiors in huge squares of rough stone. This is the site of Sardinia's most ancient monument, says the plaque at the entrance.
An early Byzantine church of the 5th century, built in a simple Greek cross form, it was elongated in a similar rough, dark stone in the 12th c. The crucifix is in the womb of the convex altar, and the side chapels are as rough as caves. The decoration is simply wood-carved statues. Where normally the Stations of the Cross line the walls, instead we see portraits of Jesus' head, only his head, through the stages of the tragedy.

A lady has come to pray, right behind me. This is the hour of mass or of prayer. One by one short round ladies sit next to the priest in his white robes, a few rows ahead, and confide their sorrows. He growls sympathetially as they speak to him in half-whispers Now he exclaims. Now he shakes his white head. Behind me the lady is working through her rosary. Next to me another lady whispers her prayers. Just in front of me an old man is reading from a small book. This is no place for tourists. Outside Jacques is talking on my cell phone with his daughter, who is stressed out studying for her exams.

Another short round Sard lady has approached the priest. "Dice," he says, but she wants to speak more privately so they move into a corner. In this most ancient of churches I vaguely whisper my own prayers. The lady with the priest is weeping. Now she has come back to join another lady, who has already had her turn with him, and they whisper excitedly together.

Jacques has come into the church, like a tall Martian among these people. We speak to the elegant young guide who waits in the church office, and she shows us the crypt, the catacombs of Phoenicians and Carthaginians and Christians, and of the body of the martyr St. Antioch, all the while people praying a few meters away. She speaks quickly in Italian and we don't understand that much, but the old stone has its own language. It is a language deeper and older than the gloomy atmosphere of St Antiocho.

St. Antiochus, a fervent Christian from Mauritius, had prayed down here before his death in the 4th c. He had been martyred here, buried here. Later more wealthy Christians had decorated their burial niches with frescoes, traces of which are still visible. The poor had undecorated pits in the floor. There are older graves, thousands of years old, many of which have never been excavated.

Hypogeal village

We then saw the hypogeal village, that is, reoccupied ancient stone tombs that had been carved into rock, underground. Now decorated with pretty ceramics, these little recycled burial tombs had slept 30 to a room, as people made the pilgrimage to see the remains of St. Antiochus and later redevelop the village. For this village had undergone the same sort of transformation as Nora and the other slender fingers that Sardinia sent out into the sea. First attracting Phoenicians with easy access and sparkling waters, they had been developed by the Romans (this one under Claudius), then abandoned as their vulnerability to Vandal and Arab attacks, and malaria, made life impossible. Later reinhabited, St. Antiochus had developed around the pilgrimage trade and then been peopled with poor migrants who lived in these underground homes.

Between the maracageuse waters and the tophets, the ancient Baal worship and vast acreage of necropolis, and the fact that this city was a kind of Siberia where the Romans sent people to work the mines, St. Antiochus has a savage feeling to it. Above the busy port the Punic burial sites and temple to Astarte and later Demeter feel windy and indifferent. The tophet feels unhappy. What did it really demand of the people here?

But the women of this village seem to cluster around us, eagerly smiling. It is a subtle, strange thing, the way they burst into a kind of fondness. We are pilgrims of a sort, and we are welcome.