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.