Spain, Toledo, all the days

This has been a week of beautiful things, so much history, so many layers. Some I’ve shared but honestly, Toledo is just bursting at the seams with all its stories. It hardly does justice to them, there’s no overall museum and so you just have to take your time and go into every door that opens and see what’s there

Lots of people are going round with guides, and that makes sense. I would have done the same but somehow never quite got round to it. And they all go too fast for me anyhow, whooshing in and out of one place after another

The story I came to find is the thing that makes Toledo somewhat unique, the interwoven threads of the three faiths followed over centuries by jews, muslims, and christians. The ”people of the book” as the muslims say, given that all three essentially derive their faith from the old testament, and are seen as descendents of the same guy, Abraham

You’d think that with all this talk of crusades and reconquistas and inquisitions and the like that there had never been any tolerance at all, but the thing is that for many hundreds of years there was. And it’s the early batches of islamic rule that are to thank for that

The first wave of muslim invaders in 711 swooshed up the country so fast that integration was to some extent unavoidable. What took them a decade or so to achieve took the christians seven centuries to roll back. And during most of that time people say there was an atmosphere of tolerance, even if the rule was firmly islamic. You can find all this in the architecture, there are so many beautiful remnants

But there were various batches of moors, caliphates and empires, and the last one was more fundamentalist. By the time of the crusades the christians were pretty fundamentalist too, so the time of tolerance was over. At least on the surface: in reality, the three faiths continued to exist, but under the surface. They couldn’t all have their own places of worship, but their craftmanship continued. And often the new mosques, synagogues, churches, just got built on top of each other, creating a fantastic layered effect

So, yeah. Some centuries of tolerance, and many of intolerance. Incredible what stories these walls could tell, if they could

These were three things I found particularly beautiful: the choir stalls in the massive cathedral (which was a temple, a church, and a mosque before it was a cathedral); the arabic doors and windows of the Cristo de la luz church/mosque which is built on the old roman road; and the lacy, swirly stucco in the Synagoga transita

So it’s been a pretty full-on week here, one of the most interesting places I’ve had the chance to explore. Feels like I learned so much, filled my soul - and have a much better understanding now of the story of Spain. It’s not simple!

Today I’ve had a day off. Housekeeping, shower, reading my book in the sun, summing up my thoughts, eating properly

And tomorrow… somewhere new. Not sure where yet, north or north-east, see how I feel in the morning. Somewhere a whole lot less complex than this anyhow!