ABSTRACT

This paper is dedicated to the memory of Dr Peter Scales, historian, archaeologist, Arabist, Hispanist.

INTRODUCTION

Each year, on Palm Sunday, at the beginning of Semana Santa, the Holy Week in which the Roman Catholic Church commemorates the last days of Jesus’ life as a man on earth, a procession enters the cathedral of Córdoba. For half a millennium the cathedral had been a mosque. The city’s bishop blesses the palms to be carried in the procession inside the Puerta del Perdón (‘gate of pardon’), at the foot of the Baroque tower which, in the words of a current guidebook, encloses the minaret of Abd al-Rahman I ‘like an almond in its shell’ (Castejón 1988: 17). Clergy and congregation then proceed southwards, across the Patio de los Naranjos (‘courtyard of orange-trees’), in which the channels of water once used by Muslim worshippers for their ritual ablutions are still visible, and into the Mezquita-Catedral (still commonly referred to in Córdoba as ‘the mosque’ rather than ‘the cathedral’) through a Christian-built porch, the Puerta de las Palmas (‘palm door’). The procession then weaves its way past medieval, Renaissance and Baroque side-chapels, under a forest of Islamic arches, into a sixteenth-century sanctuary with eighteenthcentury choir stalls.