Álvaro Vega I Córdoba, (EFE).- The exhibition ‘Change of era. Córdoba and the Christian Mediterranean’ has closed this week with the question of whether it has constituted the finding of the “missing link in the history” of Christianity in Córdoba or supposes a story that goes “against what history really was”.
Córdoba has claimed its role in the spread of Christianity with an initiative promoted by the City Council, with a budget of 1.7 million exclusively from municipal resources and more than 350,000 visitors in three months, with the support of the Junta de Andalucía and the Cabildo de the Cathedral, which have contributed two of the three venues and pieces to the exhibition.
For Miguel Santiago, spokesman for the Mosque-Cathedral/Everyone’s Heritage Platform, with this initiative, “the Córdoba City Council carries out cultural activities that promote the story of the Catholic hierarchy regarding gradually introducing the message that Córdoba has been always Christian.”
For this reason, he told EFE, the people of Cordoba cannot allow there to be “stories that go against what history really was”, where Rome places Córdoba on the map and the Andalusian era, later, as one of the great cities of the world, he emphasizes.
Exposing an era is not confronting, according to the mayor
On the other hand, the mayor of Córdoba, José María Bellido (PP), believes that “exposing one era or another does not mean wanting to Christianize or Islamize the story of the city’s history, but rather simply put it on the table and give more knowledge to the citizens about those times”.
Bellido told EFE that “starting to fight one era against another or wanting to say that when talking about one era you want to cover another is absurd.”
The president dean of the Cabildo Catedral de Córdoba, Joaquín Alberto Nieva, is positioned along the same lines, for whom “the exhibition allows us to know the history”.
“History is not invented by us, we do not create it, but we study it”, affirms Nieva, who adds that the exhibition “allows us to discover almost a missing link in the history of Córdoba”, since it offers abundant information on a period “so As important as the Roman era, the arrival of Christianity, its roots and the connection of Córdoba with the entire Mediterranean, which was also Christian”.
For the Platform of the Mosque, there is obsession
Miguel Santiago, on the other hand, considers that there is a “permanent obsession”, which he claims he does not understand, to put a Christian halo in the city first based on “a strategy from the 90s, and from the time of Juan José Asenjo as bishop, to demonstrate that the Andalusian was a period of parenthesis between the Christian Cordoba”.
“It is very sad that the City Council plays along with these claims,” he says.
The mayor believes that the exhibition, closed this Wednesday, “returns to the table that Córdoba has had a Roman, Christian, Muslim and Jewish past”, and that today “it is the result of all that conjunction” and is “a city unique in the world for that reason”.
Through more than 200 pieces, many of them described as “unique” by the curator of the exhibition, the professor of Archeology at the University of Padua (Italy) Alexandra Chavarría, the call has tried to recover the Christian splendor of Córdoba through through loans from fifty public and private institutions, which have been exhibited in three venues.
200 unique pieces
The Center for Contemporary Creation of Andalusia (C3A) has presented the iconography linked to the Old and New Testaments and the role that Christianity played in the emperors of the last centuries of the Roman Empire, starting with Constantine, in the consolidation of the barbarian kingdoms and the restoration of Justinian, as well as the repercussions that these events had in Hispania and in Córdoba.
The headquarters located in the Mosque-Cathedral has been claimed as the episcopal complex of Córdoba, since the complex that is located under its soil “is the result of more than three centuries of uninterrupted occupation of the religious authority of the city”, with the location in the 1932 excavations of what could be a church under the western columns of the central nave of the Mosque.
Vimcorsa, the municipal housing company, has collected the archaeological evidence of the first Christians of Córdoba, which, as in most Western Mediterranean cities, occurs in cemeteries, although what is known of the oldest churches in the city, such as the one that Isidoro de Sevilla cites as the Basilica of San Acisclo, in the western suburb and close to the walls. EFE