Cordoba November 7

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Cordoba, November 7, 2007

Once more they loaded us onto 3 busses and this time we headed off to Cordoba. It was autobahn all the way. The fascinating thing was that it took 1 ½ hours by bus to travel what we did in 45 minutes by high speed train.

They parked the busses outside the city walls (just behind me when I took this picture was the corner of the wall) and walked us up to a store which allowed free access to toilets in exchange for browsing tourists. To the right is the outside wall of an 8^th century Muslim mosque.

We gathered in the courtyard of the Mosque. At this point our lecturer is behind me. He has just pointed out that when this was a Mosque these doors did not exist; you could walk directly from the courtyard into the Mosque. After the Christians conquered the city this building was converted to a cathedral with a main altar and side chapels built inside, so these doors were inserted to make the passage into the church "typical".

At this time, the doors are needed to force you to pass by the ticket collector so the current maintenance group is glad they were added.

The mosque was expanded 4 different times and at least the last one they admit was strictly to make it more grandiose. The original construction was 9 aisles like this one. You would enter the west side of the mosque and walk down the aisle to the holy wall facing east.

The construction was typical Arabic and in fact the architects were imported from Turkey I believe. The first set was using materials reclaimed from the old Roman village here so the columns were all different (based on what they could find) and the top was two arches made of reclaimed stone and reclaimed brick. This photo is from the last expansion, and the "brick" is actually painted in but looks like the original. This section had much better light than the original section which is why I used this photo.

The eastern wall was the highlight of the mosque, and in the center of that wall was the highlight of the highlight. This photograph does not do it justice, but you can get the idea that the decorations are very well done. The amazing thing is that the site has been allowed to remain in spite of being in a Christian Cathedral for over 500 years!

The only portion of the mosque that the Christians destroyed was the geometric center. In this portion they removed the columns and the roof and inserted a Gothic cathedral. The main altar is under reconstruction, so this photo is taken from the choir. The wood on the lower portion is "American Mahogany" (I believe it was Columbian) and each stall is individually customized. The walls of the church are all Marble, ornately carved and gilded.

This is essentially the original minaret of the Mosque. All they did to convert it to Christian use was to add the floor containing the bells and a European style crest to it. This photo is taken from within the courtyard in front of the Mosque. This courtyard is mostly Orange trees (lower foreground) with some Palm trees and Cyprus trees as well.

We then walked through the Jewish quarters (very similar to Seville and my camera was complaining it wanted a new battery) and took us for lunch downtown in a house that originally was the Bishop's residence. The wall on the right side is an original Roman wall, so you can believe this section of town was "really old".

Lunch was a typical Spanish lunch - closer to Dinner than lunch, 4 or 5 courses (who could count that high), wine and water unceasing.

After lunch we walked back to the busses and got on the road to Grenada. We went cross country instead of autobahn so the travel took longer than planned. We got into Grenada shortly before 8PM, got our rooms and headed into town for the necessary shopping and to find a place for dinner.

After some shopping we found a very nice little place and got a simple 2 course dinner. When we got back to the hotel they had a fussball game on the tv so I had my beer in the lounge and watched it while Marnie finished her journaling.

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