I'm another world away but I always feel at home

 As you are driving along the highways and byways of Portugal, you see trees with numbers painted on them. Some of the numbers are more vibrant, some are more faded. Trees with more faded numbers have nearly black bark. Trees with much lighter bark have much more vibrant are more of a reddish pink to grey colour. Some trees have no numbers at all. It is a curious thing but our guide chooses not to explain it, telling us we will all understand in a few days. Frustrating, but okay.

On my actual birthday, we are on a cork farm just outside of Évora. This has been referred to as a "cork farm" in all the literature and each time it is referenced by our guide. I don't know anything about cork other than its use in wine bottles, shoe, and trivets. Maybe it floats? I think it floats but it is not tenable to build a boat out of it. But we are going to a cork farm to find out how cork is grown and made and manufactured.

First thing we learn is that cork comes from trees. It is tree bark. Specifically it comes from cork oaks that are very finicky and don't grow just because you plant them. In fact, if you plant a line of cork trees in order to make a cork farm in some kind of orderly fashion, the trees will die off before they can be harvested just to spite you. You have to just let the trees propagate where they propagate and hope you get a good harvest eventually.

Second thing we learn is that it takes 25 years for a cork tree to grow enough bark to harvest. The first harvest is almost always the lowest grade of cork possible and goes into the making of thin cork products like wallets and purses and other trinkets. It is pressed together with the bark from other sub-par cork trees and maybe can be used for cheap cork things. This usually lasts two harvests. There are typically between 9 and 12 years between harvests.

The trees are then painted with the last digit of the year they were harvested. Older trees have darker bark. 

Trees harvested more recently have newer bark. Fresh harvested trees area reddish pink.

We were introduced to Big Mama, a 100+ year old tree that was the reason the founders decided to farm cork.

All of the bark is never stripped away. Doing so would harm the tree and as these are spiteful trees, no one wants to harm them.

                                                                          More cork trees.

As cork is a once a decade harvest, most cork farms are also vineyards. The owner of this vineyard is about my age. They also went to my high school at the same time I did. As soon as we met him I knew who he was. Do you think I can remember his name or did anything like take a picture of him? No. I did not. But it was neat to see someone I went to high school with in Portugal.

We went for a bit of a four by four tour of the vineyard and cork farm. We learned that Iberian ham is reared on cork acorns; the Spanish farmers will send in wee pigs at the beginning of the season, the pigs will eat tons and tons (literally) of acorns, and the cork farmers will be paid based on how much weight the pigs gained. This is very lucrative. The pigs were gone by the time we got there.

This particular farm had a cork and wine interpretive centre (for lack of a better word). It is very clear when walking through the main building that it is an active, working winery. This is on a catwalk to a loft. Despite my connection with the owner of the farm and the fact it was my birthday, I wasn't allowed into the room armed with a barrel drill and a straw.

The rest of the day was spent walking around Évora.

 

 

Next: I think the word "most" is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

Through my trials and tribulations, and my travels through the nations

Évora is a city that has been constantly occupied since the 6th century BCE. As a result, it has seen many occupiers who have left their mark. As it is in most cases, the mark that lasted was the Romans.

Not a folly. This what remains of the Roman Temple of Évora. It is falsely called the Temple of Diana after the goddess of the moon, chastity, and the hunt. It was originally built to honour and worship Agustus in the first century BCE. It has since been destroyed and rebuilt countless times and it is unlikely that any part of the original is in this structure. It has been used by Greeks to honour Zeus, as a centre for politics, and now stands in the middle of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Évora.

Of course, there are many cathedrals within the city. At some point they all begin to bled together so I will focus on Cathedral Évora because the stories are more interesting. 

Most cathedrals are Roman Catholic and this one is no exception. The main way to tell is that everything in it is elaborate and covered in gold - Protestants were much uncomplicated. Less concerned with spending money to prove their faith. The upside is that Catholic churches are usually more beautiful to look at in terms of art and statuary and so forth. 

A lot of Catholic art is the same. There isn't a lot of variation because deviation from the norm is heresy and there aren't enough hail Marys in the world to come back from that. Most heretic art is destroyed or hidden away. We never learn of it because victors write history. This church is not a place for victors.

 As with any Catholic church, there is a depiction of the Virgin Mary. What makes Évora's Mary stand out is....well....

She's pregnant! There are incredibly few pregnant Madonnas in the world and I count myself lucky to have seen one. There was also another pregnant Madonna whose stomach opens to show a triptych of her life, but it was in a museum you had to pay to enter and Matthew 21:12-13 shows us that Jesus isn't so kind to people who change money inside a church. So I'm not about to take my chances.

What follows is one of my favourite travel stories. It might anger some people so if you're religious and easily offended maybe skip it. Or read it and have your delicate sensibilities challenged. Your call.

Some time between the 15th and 18th centuries, an artist was commissioned to paint a fresco for the church. Their name and the date are lost to time because people are uptight. The fresco they painted depicted Jesus baptizing Mary Magdalene. A woman. Pearls were clutched and gasps abounded and people probably died from shock. The elders of the church - who commissioned the painting in the first place - saw that the congregation lost their ever loving minds, decided that this must be destroyed immediately and the artist must give them back their money. The artist instead offered to "fix" the work to be a much more traditional John the Baptist baptizing Jesus. The church agreed and the artist came up with this:

Trans Jesus. The artist covered up Mary Magdalene's womanly bits with a cloth over her womanly hips and thighs, kept her crossed arms over her womanly boobs, and added a beard. Thus creating Trans Jesus. Slight alterations were made to Jesus to turn him in to John the Baptist as well. I guess Trans Jesus was okay bu the church because Trans Jesus is till around today. 

There are many other beautiful parts of this church including cloisters. These are typical of most cathedrals that have cloisters and are not all that worthy of being in a subversive art post. Quite frankly, the star of this show is Trans Jesus.

I'll close out on something I found interesting. I've been in countless churches of various religions around the world. Most religions have an aspect to them where you can light a candle for some reason. These are typically physical candles with wicks and wax and flames. The effect is very beautiful, very spiritual and peaceful. it's also kind of expensive and wasteful; people typically pay about 50 cents to $1 per candle and that doesn't cover the cost of the candles. When the candles are burnt out, they're not reused in any way (that I know of). Plus the soot from the smoke when extinguished isn't much from just one candle, but over time with thousands of candles it builds up. Also fire is a real thing that is really bad.

Instead, Cathedral Évora offers LED candles. For €1, you can buy a candle under many of the statues and in the shrines or at the nave. I don't know how long they're illuminated for. I thought this was pretty innovative and noteworthy. I don't know if it is commonplace but I haven't seen it before or since.

Next: actual birthday.

Wind Up on the Very Same Pile

 Nos ossos qve aqvi estamos pelos vossos esparamos

We move on to Évora. Évora is an ancient, walled city that in many ways reminds me of Calgary. 

See, for many years - decades - Calgary tried to build a ring road. Construction and funding and being a resource-based economy all being what they are, the ring roads would be built, then massive neighbourhoods would spring up on the other side, causing the need for another ring road to be built around the new area a few years later. Calgary was eventually successful in building a ring road around the city, though time will tell how long it lasts.

Évora is similar in that the city was initially founded as a Roman settlement, so the Romans built a wall. The wall is high and slanted, which gave the hot oil the poured down it to fight off invaders a better chance.

Most of the city is encased in either the Roman wall or the "new wall" which was built in medieval times after the city grew around the perimeter of the Roman wall. The more modern version of the walls came much, much more recently in the form of highways.

Inside the walls lies a robust city with tiled streets. It is all on a hill so you really get a work out in! 

 

Something that is important to know about me is that I cannot count. I'm very bad at it and I am okay with this fact about me. This is worth mentioning because I thought Évora would be on my birthday and I could accomplish a travel goal: visit an ossuary. 

An ossuary is a temple made of bones. They can be built for many different reasons from the pragmatic to the religious to the morbid. Évora's ossuary falls into the pragmatic category. How could it be pragmatic, you ask? Well, there was a plague and a lot of people died, and they were running out of space so they relocated the bones of the dead to this chapel, thus creating an ossuary.

And I thought, what a profound way to spend my birthday: reflecting on life and the remnants thereof.

Except we were in Évora the day before my birthday. 

Still profound.

                                                        We bones that are here, for yours we wait

The monks who created the ossuary did so to create a final resting place of respect and dignity for the over 5,000 people here. Otherwise their remains would have been dug up and discarded or buried over. 

The space isn't large at all and as soon as you are in it, you are struck silent. First as your brain reconciles what it is seeing, then by the awe of the room. It isn't a place you want to go touching things or going off the marked path. You also don't spend a long time in this room because it's all a bit much.

Next: subversive art and 2023 collide in one church.