Portugal Part 2 - Convento la Batalha, Monasterio de Alcobaçah

Okay all you architecture freaks and Marilyn Manson fans... You´re all in for a treat this week because today´s blog entry is totally GOTHIC.

During my Portugal trip of two weeks hence, after Coimbra, I hit up two sweet cathedrals. The first was called the Convento de La Batalha, which means 'Nunnery of the Battle'...



It was built in the 15th century to commemorate the battle of Alijubarrota, which happened on August 14th, 1385. Basically what happened is this: the Spanish we´re constantly trying to invade Portugal, and the Portuguese constantly fighting them off. Meanwhile, over in England, this lairy geezer called John of Gaunt, who held the bad-ass post of Duke of Lancaster, was charming the pants of this bird called Costanza, who happened to be daughter of the Spanish king Pedro. John of Gaunt was so lairy, in fact, that according to Shakespeare, here´s what he said on his deathbed:

¨This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings...¨

For all the Whelans reading this, you might remember that Uncle Wake (or maybe Grandma) has a book at Thurmont called ¨This Realm, This England¨, which is pretty distinctively Whelan, and pretty cool, now that we know where it comes from.

Where was I? Oh yeah. So after John of Gaunt marries Constanza, he tries to take over Spain, unsuccessfully, several times. One of the ways he does this is by supporting the Portuguese. So in 1385 he sent 500 drunken Brits with crossbows to Alijubarrota and they helped the Portuguese beat the tar out of the Spaniards. The Portuguese celebrated with several decades of hard labor, hauling and hoisting stone, not sleeping in on Sundays, all to build this convent that I saw, which was, admittedly, rather impressive. Here it is in black and white, because really, all cathedrals shouls be shot in black and white:



It had a sweet doorway with dozens of saints carved in intricate detail. Here´s Evan standing in it (which, by the way, is part of a series I have of Evan standing in doorways)...



And here´s the doorway by itself...



It had a little statue of some saint with a hideous demonic beast on a leash...



It had a sweet gothic ceiling (Kelly modelling),



It had Jesus...



You better believe it had buttresses...



And it had a sweet equestrian statue of Nuno Alvarez Pereira, the lairy general who won the battle for the ´Guese... He was so lairy, in fact, that he got out of control and had to join a Dominican Order at the end of his life. But for a while, he kicked ass. Just look at this...



The next cathedral we went to was called Alcobaçah, and it was rife, rife, I tell you, with romance, stonework, and GOTHICNESS. Here´s Jorge, one of the goofball IES staffers standing out front...



Here´s Matt looking introspective by the inner cloisters. This photo is, incidentally, part of a series that I have of pictures of Matt looking introspective...



And the best part about Alcobaçah was the story of Dom Pedro the Cruel and his boo Dona Inez de Castro. She was a hot noble from Galicia, who came as a lady-in-waiting to Costance of Castile, who was getting married to Dom Pedro, the rising king of Portugal. Pedro and Inez met. They danced. They sucked face. Sparks flew. It was a lot like that J-Lo movie The Wedding Planner, in fact. But the powers that be wouldnt let Pedro marry his boo, so he made a wifey out of Constance, and when she died, Pedro was all set to marry his true love. Not so easy. In the meantime, Constance´s brothers had decide that in order to preserve the purity of the throne, they had to off Inez, who was, as I mentioned, totally hot and ready to get it on with Pedro. Pedro was so infuriated that he killed ALL of Constance´s brothers, as well as several hundred other people who had nothing to do with the situation, and became a really ornery old geezer who loved killing people, eating steak tartar, and playing darts in dive bars for the rest of his life. He also loved GOTH stuff and first-person shooter video games.

Pedro and Inez are buried toe to toe in Alcobaçah so that when Jesus comes back, they´ll both stand up and be able to play some tonsil hockey together again, like old times... It looked like this...

Dom Pedro...



Dona Inez...



If you don´t believe my version of the story, here´s what Portugal´s main man of letters, Luis de Camões, has to say about it...

As filhas do Mondego a morte escura
Longo tempo chorando memoraram,
E, por memória eterna, em fonte pura
As lágrimas choradas transformaram.
O nome lhe puseram, que inda dura,
Dos amores de Inês, que ali passaram.
Vede que fresca fonte rega as flores,
Que lágrimas são água e o nome amores.

This act of horror, and black night obscure,
Mondego's daughter long resented deep;
And, for a lasting tomb, into a pure
Fountain transformed the tears which they did weep.
The name they gave it (which doth still endure)
Was Ines' loves, whom Pedro did keep.
No wonder, such sweet streams water those flowers:
Tears, are the substance; and the name Amours.

- Luiz de Camões, Os Lusíadas, Canto III

Also, when we were at Alcobaçah, there was a wedding party waiting outside for the bride and groom, to throw rice at them. We, like proper tourists, walked right through the affair, all 60 of us, without noticing what was going on, but just before that, I scored these two artsy shots, which I think are shoe-ins for the Robert Doisneau / Henri Cartier-Bresson school of pretentious black and white character shots. They could be called ¨Waiting for the Bride, No. 1¨and ¨Waiting for the Bride, No. 2¨ or something creative like that. Or maybe I should title them in French. That would be sweet.





Love,
Robbie

Portugal Part 1 - Coimbra

Onde pode acolher-se um fraco humano,
Onde terá segura a curta vida,
Que não se arme e se indigne o Céu sereno
Contra um bicho da terra tão pequeno?

[Where may frail humanity shelter
Briefly, in some secure port,
Where the bright heavens cease to vent their rage
On such insects on so small a stage?]

-- Luis de Camões (1524-1580)

Portugal is a very poor, very faded, very wrung-out type of place. You could see it in the chipped paint of the walls of the buildings, the rusty metal balconies, and the sad-looking potted window-boxes. If you go so far as to read about it, you start to see it in the country´s history -- its periodic subjection to the Spanish crown, its devastating earthquake in Lisbon in 1755, its always-tenuous and quickly-relinquished hold on its piece of the colonial pie. It´s like the poet Camões said... the heavens have been venting their rage on the Portuguese for centuries, and everything is still crumbled, still not recovered.

Look, for example, at the colors of Coimbra, the small, charming university town that we visited first on our trip to our neighbor country...

























Since Coimbra is a comparable city to Salamanca (there uni was started in 1280, ours in 1218), I found it so interesting that they tried, in their way, to make the town colorful... But in the end, everything fell into the same kind of medieval European disrepair that Salamanca has. The difference is that in Salamanca, everything is old-looking tan-colored sandstone, and it can´t look anything but antiquated. In Coimbra, the lazily-painted walls were like a quick inadequate whitewashing of the city´s poverty... like a woman trying to paint over a burn on her face with bad cover-up.

Notice in the top photo the façade it covered with bluish square tiles... These are called azulejos, and they come from Seville. At their prettiest, they look like these, which are from a hallway in the University...



Absolutely everything in Portugal is covered with them, because when the big famous early modern buildings were being built, they didn´t have enough money for the stone carvings and elaborate marblework of Salamanca. The azulejos are a constant reminder of the subjected, melancholy feeling of Portugal.

The University of Coimbra, however, was fantastic. It must be quite the experience to study there, with a library that looks like this (that´s my friend Christian in the fore)...



And a quad (plaza) that looks like this (hi, ashley)...















and this (hi big john, miguel)...















with its big, imperious clock tower (and matt, thinking)...




And a chapel with an unbelievable pipe organ (miguel again)...


















and guys like me looking goofy while posing for pictures with the coimbra rooftops in the background...



and with their old faded, blackening statue of the university´s founder, João I, which looks remarkably like Hans Holbein the Younger´s portrait of Henry VIII...



and again, with Pepe courting Ashley at João´s feet...



And here´s the Law School... Note the words... ¨Faculdade de Direito¨. In Spanish it would be ¨Facultad de Derecho¨. These are the types of similarities that allowed me to annoy everyone by trying to speak Portuguese, which for me meant applying the three or for Portuguese pronunciation rules directly to Spanish. I was a real hit.




A lot of the students at the University live in co-ops called republicas. Here´s an IES staffer, Alfredo, posing with a republica in the background...



Most students who live in the republicas voted for GW Bush, as you can tell by the stickers on this door, which are being so helpfully highlighted by my buddy Jose...



And here´s a republicano himself, who stuck his head out the window to tell us that his republica, was, in fact, co-ed, but only at night, after they get a few drinks into the gals...



And after the university, we saw Coimbra´s small, but fantastic cathedral (with evan and ashley in front)...



and again, with dave...



and finally, with me, pointing out to yinz that leaves are in fact a symbol of portugal, and that´s why they´re all over the entranceway to the cathedral...




and that is where I leave you, for it´s time for literature class. Coming up: more cathedrals, art shots, and bella Lisboa.

Love,
Robbie

La Sierra de Francia

As I may have said before, been travelling faster than I can blog, so this entry is a little out of date, but it deals with a trip I took to an area in Castille, south of Salamanca, called La Sierra de Francia.

The name, like many other place-names in Spain, comes from the sad historical fact that the Iberian peninsula has been overrun by so many different other civilizations (the celts, the Goths, the Berbers, the Romans, Napoleon, etc…) that yes, there are even some French areas.

The highlight of the region is a tiny town called Alberca, a pueblo with lots of narrow streets, and curiously, lots of Tudor-looking architecture like this…



Alberca, we were told by our tour guides, seems like it´s ¨frozen in time¨, with lots of viejos sitting around waiting for you to come chat with them, some of the finest chorizo and jamon Serrano on the continent, and a communal pig called El Cerdo de San Antonio who is allowed walk around the town as he pleases for a year, unimpeded by the rules that normally bar pigs from entering any home, restaurant, or post office they please. At the end of the year of freedom, Fat Anthony is slaughtered and eaten with much theatre (these Spaniards are so predictable…) and a big parade featuring who else but the Virgin Mary, in statue form.

So I made it my goal to find El Cerdo de San Antonio and get a photo of myself either (a) hugging and kissing him or (b) dangling a piece of ham in front of his nose.



Turns out, all the viejos are pretty ornery, El Cerdo de San Antonio either doesn´t exist or wasn´t feeling up to the weater, and chorizo, even the muy rico kind from Alberca, is disgusting.

I did, however, find the biggest wine skin I´ve ever seen, mad out of an entire pig carcass, tanned black. Imagine drinking something in the neighbourhood of 25 bottles of wine out of an ENTIRE pigskin! I tried to buy it but it cost almost €100. Here´s a picture of me sticking my finger in its cauterized naughty bits…



A few more pictures of Alberca. Dave and Evan…



And of course an art shot of the plaza...



Much nicer than Alberca, however, was the Peña de Francia, a huge mountain convent near the pueblo. After a nerve-wracking busride up a very narrow mountain road, we arrived and it looked like this...



And this...



And here´s my friend Daniel looking out over the view...



And climbing on the rocks...



More climbing...



And here´s the all-white Virgin who appeared in the 15th century, because, as we all know, seeing visions of the Virgin is the thing to do in Spain...



Miguel de Unamuno, Salamanca´s foremost man of letters, wrote this poem about her:

Madre Blanca de Castilla
Que a Francia le dio un Rey santo
Maternidad castellana
De corazón todo blanco

Nuestra Señora la Virgen
Madre de Dios soberano
La de la Peña de Francia
En el corazón serrano

De España, sobre las Hurdes
De Extremadura barranco;
Maternidad castellana
Que está de piedad sangrando.

Peña de Francia desnuda
Ay corazón descarinado,
Madre Blanca de Castilla
Dióle a francia Luis el Santo.

(translation will be provided on request, if anyone´s interested enough to leave a comment to that effect.)

And here´s an art shot of this spindly image of Santiago Director of the Dept. Of Homeland Security, looking out over the valley...



And finally, as we were leaving, I got this sweet shot of a guy in traditional garb beating a drum and blowing a flute outside the chapel as the priest was opening the doors for a wedding party that was on its way up to the top (we saw them from the bus on the way down)...



That´s all! Coming up, a two or three part post about Portugal, and then pictures from San Sebastian and Granada. Blog or die! ...and keep those comments coming.

Love,
Robbie

At La Peña de Francia,