Searching for Portugal’s Arabic past
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By Jason Webster Sunday Times 4 April, 2004 A madman ran the museum at Serpa, standing alone in the great moss- covered courtyard inside the old castle walls with half a dozen cats, wordlessly pointing things out in the rain to nonexistent visitors. Sheltering under my umbrella, I skipped over the puddles towards the entrance: I couldn’t tell if he’d seen me, so engrossed was he in explaining the structure of the phallic-shaped battlements to his invisible tourists. I’d seen the same design on the Arabic walls at Cordoba. A giant lump of the fortress hung precariously overhead, having been dislodged during a Spanish siege several hundred years earlier; it still hadn’t fallen down completely, so it was left there: a reminder of the attack, but making the point that the invaders hadn’t quite managed to destroy everything. It seemed very Portuguese, somehow.
On the upper floor of the museum I looked down onto the rest of the town, a muddle of white buildings and terracotta roofs squashed together within the limits of the ancient city walls. It was a quiet place: had it been a Spanish town, kids on scooters would have been riding down the wiggly streets at top speed, silencers removed from their exhaust pipes. Or music would be blaring from somewhere: dance music, pop. Noise of some sort. Here was just silence, even in the middle of the day. And it wasn’t even lunch time.
Odd minaret-like chimneys rose from every house — tall cylinders capped with a dome and little stone ball on top, like the golden spheres that had once graced the Giralda in Seville, and which you could still see on her sister minaret in Marrakesh, the Kutubiyya. Geese, chickens and pigeons scrabbled among the gardens huddled at the foot of the castle defences, safe from the cats inside, sheltering from the downpour underneath lemon and fig trees, morning glories and virginia creeper with the first shades of red showing in its leaves.
Across the square I could just make out the bar where the night before I’d eaten the most delicious fish stew — sopa de cossمo — stuffed with coriander, garlic and lemon juice, slices of chewy bread floating on top. The Spanish had almost eradicated the use of coriander from their cooking, a herb the Moors used all the time — kuzbara, they called it; here its influence had lasted. I had been enjoying the meal, but for the bitter-tasting wine.
Portugal struck me as a fundamentally odd place: as though everyone here had had their testosterone levels artificially set to zero at birth. How else could you explain their languidness, moodiness, their melancholy and the nightly showing of the Women’s Roller Hockey World Championship on primetime TV?
Just as I was turning to leave the museum, a photograph in one of the display cabinets caught my eye. It showed a small dirty-white building, square and with a round dome on top — an unmistakable Moorish design. Underneath, a strip of paper pinned to the photo simply said “Santa Margarida Mosque”. I looked back in my guidebook: there was no mention of such a place. And the man at the tourist information hadn’t brought it to my attention either. There was no clue to the whereabouts of the mosque.
I leant over to the window to peer into the courtyard, where the mad curator had been when I’d arrived: he was no longer there. I felt certain that somewhere inside that jumbled mind was the location of the Santa Margarida Mosque, so I set off to find him.
He crept up on me from behind as I went searching for him in the prehistoric section. With a start I turned round. His face was kind, skin like sandpaper, and, like most Portuguese men I’d seen, he wore a flat cap on his bony head.
“Olل,” he said. Just as in Spain, the greeting came from Allah, but with deeper Portuguese vowels it sounded even more like the original word.
“Olل. Santa Margarida,” I explained. “A mesquita.”
And then it began: the most bizarre set of instructions I’d ever heard, spoken in a garbled version of a language I already had difficulty understanding, and accompanied by huge sweeping arm movements and wild eyes. At times I thought I could pick out odd words of German or French. Just what language was the man speaking?
Then he made the sounds of a river, birds twittering, a crunching noise as he jumped up and down. It was pure nonsense, but at the same time, and to my surprise, I started to understand what he meant: take the road to Beja, then turn off and cross a river bed, up a dirt track (the jumping up and down was the movement of a car driving on a bumpy road) and the mosque was in the middle of an orchard. The effect of the man’s wild gesticulations and gibberish-talk was to give me a crystal-clear image of my route, as though he’d shown it to me on film.
And so, 15 minutes later, I found myself outside the hidden Mosque of Santa Margarida, surrounded, as he’d told me, by olive trees filled with twittering birds, at the top of a slope on the other side of the muddy river bed from the Beja road. The mosque looked like a second world war pillbox: a small greying structure with cracking walls covered in mildew, and a tiny green door. It was the spitting image of zawiyas you come across all over Morocco, and which could still be found in Spain: a quiet spot, perhaps marking the tomb of a holy man, or a solitary place of prayer; perhaps the meeting point for annual religious processions, when everyone marked a certain saint’s day by walking out of town in a column to a sacred place in the country. Romerيas, they called them in Spain; romarias in Portugal, moussems in Morocco. Christian, Muslim: it didn’t matter. Today they still called it a mosque, only it was dedicated to a Christian saint.
I tried the door, but it was locked. There was nobody around. This part of Portugal, the Alentejo, was supposedly the poorest region in Europe: people were a rare commodity. I tried again, but still it refused to open; I might have tried harder, but I didn’t want to have break-in and entry into a mosque/church on my conscience. After circling round it a couple of times I realised that there was no way in, and nobody was on hand with the key. Probably empty, I thought, in an attempt to console myself. Finding it in the first place was the important thing.
It started raining again and I headed back to the car. Although deep inland and almost on the Spanish border, you felt the presence of the Atlantic in the rapid shifts of weather blowing in off the ocean: rain, then searing humid heat, strong winds, then more rain.
It was time to go. The inside of the mosque would have to remain a mystery.
Andalus: Unlocking the Secrets of Moorish Spain by Jason Webster is published by Doubleday at Ă‚ÂŁ12.99. To buy it for the reduced price of Ă‚ÂŁ10.39, plus Ă‚ÂŁ2.25 p&p, call The Sunday Times Books First on 0870 165 8585
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