Europe from the edges
Favorite Husband and I spent the last week swanning around Andalusia, admiring the remains of Moorish Spain's clash of civilizations. It's a trip well worth taking, particularly if you're interested in the historical long view. As it happened, I was in Istanbul (not Constantinople) for work the week before the trip to Spain. The odd juxtaposition of visits to the Hagia Sophia and Seville's Alcazar or Grenada's Alhambra within a few days of each other is something that, I'm guessing, not many people have been lucky enough to do. Given the luxury, as I was, it's fascinating to consider these monuments side-by-side, in the context of both historical and modern Europe.
At one end of Europe is Justinian's tremendous Eastern Orthodox cathedral-cum-mosque, where tourists can still visit bits of the glorious mosaics of Chistendom. At the other end of the continent is Sophia's inverse: Spain's spectacular Islamic fortresses, where Christian kings vanquished Muslim tribes and then continued to reign, leaving the intricate Moorish design intact and adding the odd crucifix or Baroque ballroom just to remind everyone who was boss -- exactly as the Muslim conquerers did in the Hagia Sofia, on the other side of Europe. I've wondered on previous visits to Istanbul why this was: seems like it would be worth the trouble to take down the largest Christian church in the world, if you were the Muslim conquerer of a Christian city. But in fact, it seems that the Christian kings on the other side of the continent made the same calculation -- just make a few modifications, and move right in. Both sets of conquerers also celebrated their victory (eventually) by erecting tremendous monuments within site of the vanquished foes' structures: the Blue Mosque stands directly across from the Hagia Sophia, and Seville's massive cathedral next to the Alcazar, while you could throw a rock from the walls of the Alhambra and hit Grenada's central church.
The Hagia Sophia, the Alhambra, and the Alcazar are museums now, but I found it impossible to see any of them as the neutral space that museums usually are. A visitor cannot help but imagine the bitterness, rage, and thirst for vengence that each civilization must have experienced on being forced to abandon the physical spaces which embodied their beliefs, art, and culture. On visiting the Alhambra, we were told that the city's last Arabic defender, Baobil, wept as he fled the beloved palace while his mother offered him this advice: "Do not weep like a woman for what you could not defend as a man." Ouch. But indeed, the sense of victor and vanquished is still palpable at all three sites; perhaps more interesting, though, is the sense of history's ebb and flow. The battles that are being fought today, both ideologically and with terrible violence, are of course nothing new -- and we all know that. However, to be reminded so clearly, so physically, of Europe's endless expansions and contractions over the centuries is more than worth a trip to any of Europe's hazy borders.
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