New Faith, Forgotten Soil

My gallego cousins knew the village of Santalla de Bóveda de Mera, but they had not visited the site. Too busy. People who idealize farm life have no idea of the work that animal husbandry entails. Cyclical, incessant, not unlike history. I had learned about Greek and Roman gods in school and Catholicism and Christianity through osmosis, but I was taken aback by the links between them. Roman roads brought commerce and travelling bands of pagan galli priests and stories of Christian martyrs whose sacrifice appealed to many women of my family, but for me. I bucked a trend when I married Brian. It was he who found Bóveda in a guidebook, listed by its Castilian name: Santa Eulalia de Bóveda.

The big green gates to the site were locked, but a pathway led to a small office where a man waited for people or wished the crowds would go away, depending on the season. He sighed when we opened the door. His whole face was a sigh, and a wry one at that. We didn’t have much time before closing. We chatted him up, our baby smiling from his carrier on my chest. Together we stepped down beneath the horseshoe arched nave, dating back to the 3^rd or 4^th century CE and thought to be the oldest of its kind in Spain. A former architect, our guide watched us see the place for the first time—a sunken granite room with an empty pool at its center, flanked by marble columns. The curved remains of the vaulted ceiling were lined with geometric shapes and criss-crossed with paintings of grapes, lotus flowers, roosters, ducks, and peacocks.

He gave us stories. It felt like he had decided we were worthy. Hundreds of years ago, villagers filled this place with dirt. That much I know is true. Burying the pagan temple saved the frescoes, though I don’t think preservation was their intent.

Laden with stone tombs, the church they built on top of this temple began to collapse. It had to be moved. While renovating their sacristy in 1914, villagers unearthed the site and did something I’ve found hard to forgive, despite being practiced in that art. Before reporting their discovery to higher authorities in 1926, they destroyed the frescoes of orgies. Or so I was told.

Below eye level, the walls are pocked and pitted and slightly more recessed than the ceiling, their painted face erased, I imagine, by pickaxes wielded by angry men in cassocks and old pants. Women could have led the effort. Rage knows no gender. The disgruntled are dangerous. Maybe they didn’t want their Catholic village to be known for a Roman orgy. No sensualist’s pilgrimage here. Most of the walls are now denuded but for damp green fuzz. It was that kind of destructive ignorance, coupled with the need to control, which put me off religion.

Or the frescoes weren’t destroyed. Maybe they were taken like the Parthenon friezes at the British Museum. A collector could have bought the frescoes off a local. The church might have received an anonymous donation. The frescoes could be installed in a mansion near a fountain filled with running water, like this pool used to be.

I don’t think global patrimony is better off in private hands, but many public efforts to preserve this place have hurt it instead. The latest team of restorers documented the damage with a meticulousness that would have benefitted their predecessors. Imagine the vibrations of prior jackhammers, how they rattled every precious rock, powdery chunks falling to the floor and into standing water. Someone dropped the only serious inscription face down, ruining its message in the 1950s. Painted marble fragments that tumbled from the ceiling into the wet, opened pool were stored in a provincial museum, where they were seen in 1975 and never again.

Another couple came in late. The guide lit a cigarette. Searching for meaning the blank walls would not yield, they exuded disappointment, having spent half an hour knocking on the door of his empty office. I watched his smoke curl and flatten, writhing in swirls over fading vermillion birds. Smoke can’t be good for ancient paint. Exasperated and accusatory, I kept quiet. I am tired of how men are careless, but I’ve learned not to antagonize anyone between me and the exit.

He gestured to the ceiling, where a vent led to a huge dehumidifier, an industrial version of a box fan. It’s not doing much good. He flicked ash onto the flagstone.

Pagans had channeled natural springs through Bóveda to supply water for worshippers. The site is believed to have been converted to Christian uses after Eulalia, now a patron saint of Barcelona, was martyred in the 4^th century CE, when she was publicly stripped and tortured under the pagan rule of the Roman emperor Diocletian. During the 20^th century Franco dictatorship, a governmental architect cut off the spring’s flow. The stones sweat groundwater. Now moss furs the cracks of the empty pool and creeps up the walls.

I studied the ceiling through his wreath of smoke. Cumulative mistakes have erased so much knowledge. Sensing my melancholy, which he seemed to understand on an existential level, he began a story about the painted birds. A diversion.

See how this building is wrapped by another stone shell, like a second skin? Well, they used to keep exotic birds in those dark corridors, and at a certain time in the ceremony, they let in the light, waking up the birds. Their shrieks and whistles could be heard through the walls, affirming that the gods had arrived. Pointing to the whirring ceiling, he said that bulls were sacrificed on the upper floor, above a latticework that allowed blood to cascade onto a pagan below. A baptism hot with death, alive to the dark Mysteries within. Indicating an apse on the wall, he said, The bull’s balls were carried there by a priest. I translated for my husband in hushed, hurried bursts, nodding and breathless beneath the moldering arches, my mind blazing.

The other couple waved and got in their car. After they were gone, he offered to show us a pulpería in nearby Lugo, a walled Roman city once called Lucus, his sudden helpfulness a stark contrast to what I had noticed. Pointing at ivy which dangled from steel wires meant to protect the site from birds, he said it funneled rain through stone carvings that flanked the front door—softly eroding bas-reliefs of an ibis and a phoenix, worshippers with twisted limbs in supplication, and women dancing with coronas of flowers. He did nothing but complain. Fatalism is powerful. Bring out the gardening shears, my friends.

One hundred years after Bóveda’s temple was discovered, I walked out with the sense I had slipped through a portal to ancient times. I couldn’t stop talking about pagan rites with my family, who had spent the day tending to their cows. Caring for animals is ceaseless. As a mother, I should know. Despite their daily responsibilities, my cousins have never made me feel like a burden; unlike many Americans, they prefer long visits, lamenting any stay less than a week. At 33, sleepless but buoyant with my baby, I relaxed into their warmth and care. Being welcomed by these good people led me to an obsession with the great mother goddess whose name I learned on this day: Cybele.

I wonder what that guide was thinking as we tailed him through lush hills to what did turn out to be a good restaurant, where he beeped and sped off. Did he chuckle? Did he settle in for a bemused smoke?

Tourists are like children. So ready to believe.

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