Mr Church and Senora Superwoman

Tuesday February 5 - Friday February 8, Cordoba and Toledo, Spain
Tuesday, 10pm
It’s probably not the most auspicious start to a tightly packed three day filming schedule to find yourself pleading with the Guardia Civil at Malaga airport not to lock up your camera equipment overnight. We had meant to drive straight to Cordoba, but were to be thwarted. The customs officials had finished their shift for the day, and they needed to check our equipment to assure themselves we weren’t importing it from Tunisia into Spain. “We had a bit of trouble in Tunisia too,” our cameraman Ian Serfontein reflects, “but nothing as officious as this.”

Wednesday

Twelve hours later we find ourselves, after a night at the local Ibis Hotel, back at the airport negotiating with customs and finally being allowed to head two hours north to Cordoba.
We’re here of course to film the great Mezquita which dates back to 784 CE and was the most magnificent of over one thousand mosques in the city in Islamic times. It was enlarged in stages under successive rulers and was at one time the second largest mosque in the Muslim world. It is most notable for its giant red and white double arches and forest of over one thousand columns. I had arranged filming permission with one Rafael Iglesias (Mr. Church no less) who turns out to be far more pleasant and amenable in person than I had imagined. But lunch is an important business in Spain, and we are to come back at 3pm when he would be ready for us.

This still leaves us three hours to try to capture something of the disorientating mystery of the enormous warehouse-sized prayer hall. Unfortunately, whole parts of it had been sectioned off for building renovation with unsightly barriers. How also to convey the uniqueness of this building, which after the ‘Reconquista’ quite literally had had a highly decorated Catholic cathedral inserted into the middle of it, when the nave too is undergoing serious restoration works? “I don’t know if I mentioned about the scaffolders who arrived two days ago” remarks Mr Church casually. He hadn’t.
We are only allowed to stay until 6pm, soon after which there would be a service for Ash Wednesday. A large area of temporary seating for the congregation has been installed amongst the forest of columns in part of the mosque space as a makeshift cathedral in the absence of the real thing, spoiling, from a filming perspective, yet another section of the building.

These challenges aside, possibly the most irritating thing about filming inside heavily visited religious buildings has to be the constant flashing of digital cameras. Mr Church kindly stops tourists coming in after 5.30pm, and we have the luxury of the final half hour of the place to ourselves. This has to be one of the great pleasures of these trips: the enormous privilege of experiencing some of the world’s finest buildings in total peace and quiet.

Later, walking through Cordoba’s medieval backstreets to find a restaurant for dinner, we come upon an elaborate Catholic Ash Wednesday procession filling the air with incense.
Thursday
The next morning, after filming the large courtyard filled with orange trees we meet our first interviewee, the cathedral’s arch canon whose surname is Cumplido, which roughly translates as “complier” given that cumplir means to comply. I wonder whether in order to work at the cathedral you need to have a suitable surname.

Our elderly interviewee lives up to his name, and takes a hard line when asked if he sees the building as a symbol of interfaith understanding. Not in the least. After all, as he points out, the site still has the remains of the original basilica built by the Visigoths before the Moors conquered. Many of the columns and other building materials were taken from the remains of the basilica and re-used, and for him the building is a sacred Christian place. It is a cathedral and not a mosque, we are reminded. He has absolutely no time for the story of Emperor Charles V’s reported comment on finally visiting the cathedral after having authorised it to be built. “You have destroyed something unique,” he is supposed to have said, “and replaced it with something commonplace”. Did Charles V think he had made a terrible mistake? “That comment is a myth. He didn’t say it,” our arch canon tells us with absolute certainty and not a little irritation.

Our second interviewee teaches history at Cordoba University. He is a delightful man. Amongst other things he tells us that the double system of lower horseshoe arches and higher semi circular ones inside the mosque functions as a Roman aqueduct, with channels for rain water to be drained away from the roof. He is also very much of the opinion that if the cathedral hadn’t been built inside it, the building would have fallen to the fate of Cordoba’s other mosques, and would in all probability not have survived.

By now it is mid afternoon, and after driving across the river for a view of the mosque, spoiled by a large green crane directly in front of it, we leave Cordoba for the four-hour journey due north to Toledo. After an hour or so the car experiences some difficulties, and we find ourselves pulling into a garage in Guarroman, which is not anywhere you might normally choose to make a detour to. A “guarro” is a pig in Spanish, and is also used to mean “dirty old man”. Next to the garage there is, somewhat appropriately perhaps, a brothel with flashing neon signs of women in compromising positions. Fortunately the mechanics fix the car and thankfully we don’t have to spend a night in Guarroman which had been looking for a brief while like a distinct possibility.

We finally arrive in Toledo in time, thanks to the late Spanish dining hours, for something to eat before retiring.
Friday
The filming of two synagogues and an interview to accomplish today. Toledo is a beautiful walled hilltop town about an hour south of Madrid, and was one of the former capitals of the Spanish empire. It has a wealth of important historical buildings and enjoyed a golden age, known as La Convivencia, when Jews, Christians and Muslims lived together harmoniously. The tolerance was such that the religions almost blurred into one another and the two synagogues we have come to film bear witness to that.
The Santa Maria la Blanca synagogue, finished around 1200, has a plain interior dominated by horseshoe arches. It is a beautiful space, and feels more like a mosque than a synagogue. It was built for the thriving Jewish community by Moorish master builders and decorators. In contrast, the Transito synagogue, built some 200 years later, has no arches or pillars and is a large rectangular space with a richly decorated blaze of Hebrew inscriptions which integrate Koranic verses and Hebrew psalms and an intricately carved ceiling. Again designed and decorated by Islamic builders, it is now a museum of Sephardic culture.
Our interviewee, an elegantly dressed art historian at Toledo university, looks too young to be so accomplished an expert on the history of the period we are interested in. She tells us about the two different synagogues in some detail and explains how Toledo became a unique and important centre of learning and translation at this time, with prominent scholars of all faiths exchanging texts in philosophy, science, mathematics and theology. After the interview, she kindly offers to take us back to her house so that we can film a view of the old Jewish quarter from her roof terrace. Her front door is ajar and we walk up some steep stairs past her kitchen and living rooms. The building feels as though it must be at least 300 years old. “I need this large house as I have so many children,” she tells us. It hardly seems possible that she has any children at all. I ask her how many. “Seven” she replies. She has trouble remembering whether she is 36 or 37, and one by one her children arrive home, spanning in age from 13 to 1. They are all immaculately well-behaved and greet us with impeccable manners. She explains that it suits her very well to live within Toledo’s walls as it is completely safe – hence the front door which is always open. As we take leave of our host, who also tells me she is chairing a major commission for the government on tourism in Spain, I tell her she is a superwoman and I truly believe she is. (Linda Zuck)