The Alhambra and the Kremlin: The South and the North of Europe

by Samuel Irenæus Prime

The interior of these ancient houses is no less interesting. One, to which we were invited, was said to be the best example of the Moorish domestic architecture extant in Cordova. A few jasper columns were standing under the archway by which we passed from the court. The modern whitewash had covered the most of the arabesque embellishments upon the walls. We ascended a flight of broad, brick steps, with a solid beam of wood at the outer edge of each step, and at the head of the stairs the venerable master of the house met us kindly and made us welcome. We heard a piano as we were coming up the steps, but it suddenly ceased, and a young lady flitted out of view. The house is said to be more than a thousand years old. It may be so, but the Moorish style is so imprinted on the tastes of the people that they build age after age with substantially the same models, and it is not safe to affirm that the hands of the Moors laid any of these stones. The ceilings are very low, the rooms small, the furniture, as in all lands, is according to the taste or means of the owner, but Eastern in its style, and adapted to the quiet, languid type of the modern as well as the ancient inhabitants of this and all such climes.

The wonder of Cordova is also one of the wonders of the world. Its cathedral has been a mosque of the Moors. To see it once is an adequate reward for all one has endured in travelling thus far through the most comfortless country in Europe. To see it often, and study it in the minute details of its extraordinary plan and finish, is to lay up a store of imagery for dreams of memory through the rest of a lifetime. At least so it seems to me now, since entering its magnificent Gate of Pardon, and suddenly standing in the midst of a thousand variously colored columns,—marble, jasper, porphyry, granite,—all surmounted by Corinthian capitals, a forest in a temple, a petrified grove of trunks of majestic trees, enclosed in walls. Perhaps the memory of it will fade, so that a year or two hence the impressions of wonder, of sublimity, of vastness, will not be so strong as they are now. But at the moment when the interior first broke upon my sight, it was as strange to me that the art of men could construct such an edifice, as that the great Architect should build the walls over which the Niagara rushes for ever.

Court of Oranges, Cordova.

Stepping out of the street through a gate in a solid wall, we are in the midst of a court-yard some 400 feet long: an orange grove, venerable trees that have been bearing fruit, as now, a century or more; and three fountains send up jets of waters that fall back into large marble basins filled with goldfish which groups of children are feeding. Near the gate, on benches, elderly men are sitting, smoking, and enjoying the sunshine. The elders sat in the gate in the Scripture times, and do now in Eastern towns, and here also, where Oriental manners still obtain. In former years this court became a great resort for the people who made a mart, or exchange, as in all ages men have been tempted to make the house of prayer a market-place, and so it often becomes a den of thieves. Now, this Court of Oranges, as it is called, is the resort of old men and children, who enjoy the warmth and shade and waters of the holy precincts. Passing through this court we come to the sacred edifice itself. Its history is as eventful as that of Spain. It was built by the Moors as a mosque, and when the Christians conquered Cordova, they converted the mosque into a church, though they could not convert the Moors into Christians. And this now-called cathedral is the one that Abdurhaman began to build A. D. 786, and his son completed in 796, pushing on the work with such tremendous energy that in ten years he constructed one of the most remarkable edifices in the world. His father’s idea was to surpass every temple on earth in extent and strength and splendor. It was to be the Mecca in Europe; and when the Western world was subdued to Islam, as he and all the believers believed it would be, the holy place to which pilgrimages from all these lands would be made was Cordova. It is, therefore, the finest example that Spain possesses of that peculiar style of architecture and ornamentation which the Moors introduced, and which have been gradually disappearing with the lapse of centuries. It doubtless has a symbolism behind its material forms, and the student of art and religious thought will read in the plan and a thousand details, a meaning that does not meet the unanointed eye of the simple traveller.

The Gate of Pardon is so called because, under the Roman Catholic dispensation, indulgences were granted to those who entered by it into the temple. There is one gate of the same name in each of the cathedrals that I have visited in this country. The bronze ornaments upon the doors are very curious, the royal arms are displayed, and while the Christian inscription, in Gothic letters, of the word Deus, proclaims the true God, the Arabic letters also testify that the Mahometans worshipped him, for they write, “The empire belongs to God.”

Within the temple there is at first a sense of gloom, almost of oppression, arising from the vastness of the area and the want of height. The roof cannot be more than 40 or 50 feet high, while the floor stretches away 640 feet in length and 460 feet in breadth. A thousand columns in long lines, like trees planted in the garden of the Lord, are each of one single stone,—the spoils of temples in the East and the West, and some of them imperial gifts, and hence a variety of colors and size, showing all sorts of marbles, the green and red jasper, black, white and rose, emerald and porphyry. Crossing each other, at right angles, these rows of pillars form nineteen naves one way and twenty-nine the other; long-drawn aisles, over which the horse-shoe-shaped arches, standing one upon the other and supporting the roof, produce a marvellous effect.

THE GREAT MOSQUE, CORDOVA.

The Holy of Holies in the mosque was the Mihrab, and it has been preserved in the converted temple, with religious care, as at once a curiosity and a memorial that the Mahometan has ceased to defile these courts. It is a recess in the wall of the temple, in which the Koran was kept, and where the Kalif came to say his prayers, looking out of a little window toward Mecca. It is a small six-sided room, about twelve feet across, the floor one piece of marble, and the roof, in the shape of a shell, is also, we were assured, of a single block, and up the six sides rise marble pilasters, the whole adorned with strange Arabic art and mysterious inscriptions. When Hakem was Caliph of Cordova, he sent messengers into the East to ask for skilful artificers in painting glass and giving this strange effect to tracery in metals and stone; for there is in mosaic work, when well done, something superior to the softest painting, and quite incomprehensible. The workers in mosaic came, and their skill now shines in this miracle of Oriental art, which has been here since 965, and is as fresh and beautiful as when it shone at the feast of the Rhamadhan, in the light of a thousand lamps. In the marble floor is worn a deep groove, by the knees of devout Mussulmans, who have thus gone around it while at their devotions.