Well Spain was awesome so I guess I'll start telling you about cool things. We spent a day in Cordoba and a day in Granada and that was it (lots of travel time).
The most interesting part of Cordoba to me was the Mezquita, which was initially a pagan temple, then converted by the Visigoths to a church, then converted by the Muslims to a mosque, constantly expanded throughout a few hundred years of Muslim rule, and then converted to a cathedral by the Spanish after the Reconquista.
The cathedral is absolutely gigantic. Our tour guide said it could hold about 300,000 people. That seemed high to me, but 100,000 seemed perfectly reasonable. I got lost in there.
One note is that there are sort of two sections, the Muslim/Mosque section, where the underlying architecture is Islamic (but with lots of crosses and stuff everywhere) and the added cathedral section, which the Catholics built from scratch. Anyway, here are a few pictures.
Just posting that picture to show the level of detail that covered basically every inch of the church. Hard to give an impression of the magnitude of the effort without actually being there.
And that is almost certainly the most interesting picture. It's a crusader killing Muslims! Fun stuff for a church. This was one of the things that made Spain so interesting -- you are surrounded by evidence of the Spanish Inquisition. This was specifically put in here for the Muslims who would come to this church to convert; they needed to be reminded of the power of the Christians over the Muslims. And of course it was just to humiliate them.
Other various items that one sees around the city to remind you of the inquisition are the prevalence of pork in Spanish cuisine (Muslims and Jews can't eat pork, so feeding pork to suspected Jews or Muslims was really common) and tons of clearly Islamic structures that have crosses everywhere around them.
The most interesting part of Cordoba to me was the Mezquita, which was initially a pagan temple, then converted by the Visigoths to a church, then converted by the Muslims to a mosque, constantly expanded throughout a few hundred years of Muslim rule, and then converted to a cathedral by the Spanish after the Reconquista.
The cathedral is absolutely gigantic. Our tour guide said it could hold about 300,000 people. That seemed high to me, but 100,000 seemed perfectly reasonable. I got lost in there.
One note is that there are sort of two sections, the Muslim/Mosque section, where the underlying architecture is Islamic (but with lots of crosses and stuff everywhere) and the added cathedral section, which the Catholics built from scratch. Anyway, here are a few pictures.
This is from the Catholic part, and I tried (and mostly failed) to capture a sense of how freaking tall the ceilings are. They are much taller than in the Muslim part. This is because of the difference in the purpose of a Church vs a Mosque. A church is moreso a House of God; Jesus is physically present (transubstantiation). Muslims put a lot of emphasis, much more than Catholics, on the idea that God is "One" and everywhere at all times. They anthropomorphize him much less (at another cathedral, we saw a depiction of God standing above Jesus, but we couldn't take pictures there. You would never see this in a mosque). So a mosque is less a house of God and more a community building; it's a place for the community of the believers to meet. People pray there, teach there, organize meetings there, etc -- it has a much more multifaceted role, I think (especially the fact that people would be essentially attending lecture in the same room that they pray -- much more the case in mosques than churches).
Going back to the ceiling, the point is that in the cathedral section, the architecture is designed to impress upon you the weight of God, because he's actually there right now. So you have super-high ceilings and tons of fancy iconography. In the Muslim section, on the other hand, the ceilings are lower because there isn't that motivation.
Mom (or other interested Catholics...?) you can comment on anything about this that you disagree with or whatever.
And that is almost certainly the most interesting picture. It's a crusader killing Muslims! Fun stuff for a church. This was one of the things that made Spain so interesting -- you are surrounded by evidence of the Spanish Inquisition. This was specifically put in here for the Muslims who would come to this church to convert; they needed to be reminded of the power of the Christians over the Muslims. And of course it was just to humiliate them.
Other various items that one sees around the city to remind you of the inquisition are the prevalence of pork in Spanish cuisine (Muslims and Jews can't eat pork, so feeding pork to suspected Jews or Muslims was really common) and tons of clearly Islamic structures that have crosses everywhere around them.
The history jumps right out of the page. And, I think you made a coherent comparison of Catholic/Christian vs. Muslim faiths. I'll ask my Muslim friends what they think.
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