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.