Spring, an ideal season for travelers and pilgrims to resume their adventure through that charismatic area of Zaragoza, which, bordering Navarre, bears the curious name of the Five Villages.
On this occasion, the traveler, passionate about the enigmas of the past and a fervent admirer of this rich heritage, which, among many others, constitutes Spain's cultural heritage, has a clear destination: Luesia.
Luesia, as that other inveterate follower of Kipling and possibly also of Jack Kerouac, the writer Juan Eslava Galán, would say, is another of those places in the Five Villages that you must visit at least once in your life.
Located approximately halfway between Sos del Rey Católico and Ejea de los Caballeros, the castle of Luesia also unfortunately recalls the title of one of the greatest Hollywood films of all time: Gone with the Wind.
Fortunately, though not without having paid the revolutionary tax, both in time and in the ungrateful contempt for human barbarism, the traveler, his will seduced by adventure, enjoys, above all, contemplating what is possibly one of the most charismatic temples of Romanesque architecture in Aragon: the Church of Saint Savior.
Impressed by the height and solidity of its main apse, the traveler has the sensation of standing before a colossal work, erected by giants with rudimentary means, in an era that, significantly, many consider barbaric.
And yet, following the traveler's train of thought, the barbaric thing, in any case, would be not to marvel at the grandeur of a building that, for its time, was already the closest thing to a modern skyscraper.
The exploration continues, and in front of the south portal, it is impossible for the traveler not to think that some metaphorical oil tanker of time has foundered, releasing its entire cargo of oil spill onto a portico where, mysteriously, the sculpture of a tympanum is missing, now as smooth as a blank page, although, not without affectation, some carvings on its mortified capitals survive.
Despite his doubts and the bitter taste of thinking that the rest of the portals could have also been transferred to that metaphorical limbo where the poet Villon supposed the snows of yesteryear ended up, the traveler's spirits brighten again when he enters the monumental main portal, located on the west side, and appreciates, in its protected tympanum, an extraordinary Pantocrator, where, in the symbols of the Evangelists Matthew and Mark, that primitive memory of the captivity in Babylon, marked by the wings of bulls and lions, still remains.
On either side of the threshold, upon which the extraordinary tympanum rests, two devouring monsters remind him of the same working hands of the stonemasons he will encounter again later on his journey, in places as essential as the Church of Saint Michael of Biota.
He also notes that the motifs on the capitals on the right, as he faces the portico, somehow reproduce another of Tradition's great journeys: that of the Magi from the East, those bewildering figures who, also following a sacred route marked by a star in the firmament, unmarked by the Milky Way followed by the pilgrim, marked the significant destination of Bethlehem.
The journey, the premonitory dream, and the adoration of the Magi mark, in this imposing church of Saint Savior of Luesia, another of the recurring themes that seem to affect most of the sculptures that stand out in the main Romanesque architecture of an area, this one of the Five Villages, where the echoes of Christian tradition are also confused with the presence of the Kabbalah, whose distant echoes also survive in the dark shadows of the Jewish quarters, whose houses still survive in the main towns and cities of the area, marking those ancient Jewish neighborhoods, which, entering today, still constitutes the prelude to an exciting cultural adventure.
In the case of Luesia, the Jewish Quarter, well signposted, nevertheless extends in front of another of its monumental churches, that of St. Stephen, less impressive and also less respected than that of St. Savior, but which speaks, with its mere presence, of the importance this place had in the Middle Ages and, above all, of the charismatic and relevant cultural heritage it still possesses, which deserves to be savored in small sips, like the finest wine.
NOTICE: Both the text and the accompanying photographs are my exclusive intellectual property and are therefore subject to my copyright.
