A large part of our second day in Seville involved ambling through the Catedral de Santa María de la Sede or as it is commonly known, the Seville Cathedral.
The Cathedral is located on the site of a mosque that was repurposed as a church after the “Reconquest” before being destroyed and the Cathedral built in its place. The mosque was amongst the largest in the world in its time, with its minarets being amongst the tallest man-made structures and was a symbol of the wealth and power of the Moorish world; the Cathedral played the same role for the victorious Christians and is amongst the largest churches in the world even today.
The tourist entrance of the Cathedral is from the side, through the gift shop and past the ticket counters and an exhibition room with paintings that I don’t really recall, which leads to a corridor with a small door at its end. You walk through this tiny door, the conceit being that the grandeur is even more overwhelming when you emerge through the door into the nave of the Cathedral – it is immense, the columns supporting the roof solid and thick and remind you of the trunks of Sequoia trees. The Cathedral is built to impress.
We walked around peering into the chapels, trying to identify the many famous paintings that our guide book told us hung in various corners, checked out the purported tomb of Christopher Columbus which was under renovation (other cities, too, lay claim to that fame), stared at the stained glass windows that never fail to fascinate me, and tried to understand the beauty of the wrought-iron grills that one of the books the Writer was carrying rhapsodized about.
Just before you exit the nave and enter the Patio de los Naranjos, if you look up, there is a stuffed crocodile hanging from the ceiling. It is easy to miss it unless you know about it or happen to glance up, as we did, and it is a little surreal when you spot it unexpectedly. The story is that the Emir of Egypt asked for the hand in marriage of a daughter of King Alfonso X, also known as Alfonso the Wise, and as part of the gifts sent to make the marriage more appealing, he included a crocodile. Alfonso did not agree to the marriage but he kept the crocodile and upon its death, it got stuffed and hung in the cathedral. Today, however, it is a wooden crocodile that hangs in place of the stuffed one, a replacement, perhaps, when the stuffing gave out in the original. More interesting is the idea that Alfonso the Wise may have known that in Egypt, the crocodile was a symbol of fertility and rebirth, and may have had the stuffed crocodile placed as a talisman.
Another of the doorways opening into the courtyard has carvings of birds and animals that seem to be representations of fables. I vaguely remembered The Fox and the Crane but didn’t know what they symbolised. I found this explanation for a similar carving in another church but one assumes all ecclesiastical symbolism carries the same meaning – “the scene in which the crane extracts a bone from the fox’s throat…[has its] symbolical significance derived from the Physiologus and the bestiaries, in which the fox typifies the devil, and the crane is an emblem of Christian care and vigilance, ever active in saving souls from the jaws of hell. In this case, the crane must be imagined as coming to the rescue, not of the fox, but of the bone.”
Another carving, of a wolf and a rooster, seems to indicate a fable by Alcuin, which “applies to those people, whoever they are, who have obtained salvation rightly, but are then deprived of it by black deceits in paying heed to false breezes with their empty rumors.”
The entrance to the Giralda lies in the North-East corner of the Cathedral, close to the doorway to the courtyard and the current exit from the Cathedral.
Under the Christians, when the mosque was destroyed to make way for the building of the Cathedral, the minaret was retained and a bell-tower was added, making it even taller, and fully appropriating one of the most important cultural symbols of the Moors. Today, it stands at over a hundred metres in height, and reflects the various stages of its construction and materials used over many years under different kings.
One of the most interesting features of the minaret, that took me by surprise, is the fact that instead of climbing steps, you follow a gentle ramp whose incline decreases the closer you reach the top. As a minaret, it was used by the muezzin for the call to prayer, five times a day, and the muezzin could not afford to be out of breath when he did so. The ramp allowed him to climb the tower in ease on a horse!
There are small chambers at different levels next to the ramp in the Giralda that hold items recovered during various excavations of the Cathedral, including old doors, door knockers, tombstones and the like.
The minaret is topped by a bronze weathervane depicting the Christian Faith, holding a palm frond in one hand and a shield in the other. Palm leaves, in Christian imagery, represent the victory of martyrs, or the victory of the human spirit over the flesh, and we found them throughout the old quarters tied on balconies.
Once you reach the top, you are rewarded by grand views of the city, including looking down into the Alcázar and its gardens and can try and figure out its orientation – that had been almost impossible for me while walking through it the day before.
The Giralda was, without doubt, the highlight of the day for me. It is a beautiful building and while it is difficult to imagine what the mosque that stood at the place of the Cathedral looked like, the minaret provides a glimpse into the wonderful skill and artistry supported by the Moors. The Giralda has inspired many, many towers around the world, especially in the U.S.
Interestingly, the 12th century minaret was inspired by the Qutubiyya Mosque of Marrakesh which was also the inspiration for one of my favourite buildings in India, the Moorish Mosque at Kapurthala!
My Miniature Variant of the Grand Tour 