If one leaves Madrid in a north-easterly direction and follows the uneven path of that highway which ends, after a little more than six hundred kilometers, on the beaches of Barcina (Barcelona), where Don Quixote pitifully bit the dust in his encounter with the knight del Verde Gabán -I wonder if perhaps Cervantes wanted to recreate Sir Gawain's fight with the Green Knight in this episode- it won't take long for him to leave behind the sweet rosemary of Alcarria, to enter, after a hundred and fifty kilometers, that steppe sea of hills that surrounds the Soria city of Medinaceli, where legend has it that in one of them, on one of those hills, whose top would have delighted any Celtiberian castro, the place where one was buried is hidden one of the greatest Arab leaders who ruled the Caliphate of Córdoba with an iron fist and used the scorched earth technique with the Christians to such an extent that they soon gave him the title vo of ‘the scourge of God’: Almanzor.
But it is not from the modern Medinaceli, the one that vegetates with hardly any history at the foot of a valley that every winter receives a shroud of snow that penetrates to the marrow and its mere sight, peeking out from this familiar side of the window, raises chills. , but of the historic Medinaceli: that other one that stands on a hill, dominating the modern statue of a Christ, whose height will seem ridiculous to those who have seen the one in Rio de Janeiro, where they say - as they also say in Toledo, in Torija, in the Visigoth hermitage of Santa María de Melque and in that place, Jaén, which was called in times 'the Holy Kingdom' - which was hidden the famous Table of Solomon, which Muza and Tariq unsuccessfully searched for, when they entered the Peninsula and tore apart the Visigothic army of King Rodrigo.
And perhaps for this reason, because it is a place of symbols and myths, it received visits in the past, from poets, like the damned one - and I mean damned, because of the label that was hung on him in his own country, when he was branded a communist - Ezra Pound and possibly others, no less cursed, although by different philosophies, such as the famous black magician, Aleister Crowley, who, apparently and partly following the example of the famous French alchemist, Nicolás Flamel, also came to old Hispania in Search for lost keys.
Arriving at this Medinaceli and passing under its famous Roman Arch, induces, in the mind of any traveler, the feeling of having gone back two thousand years in time, since it is a contemporary of Jesus Christ and the sleepy Roman legionnaires continued to parade under its arches. , long after he was crucified, by order of Pilate and the inflexible insistence of the Sanhedrin, on Mount Calvary in Jerusalem.
Within the splendid cultural package that Medinaceli can offer the visitor, on this occasion, I would like to make a brief emphasis on one of its lesser-known and yet darker buildings, closed to visitors and the sight of which arouses bad vibrations and the desire to get away from it as quickly as possible: the Beguinage of San Román.
Set back a little from the historic center itself, on the solitary path that leads to the old Arab snowfield, the San Román Beguinage is a strange building, as I have already said, above all because both its structure -regardless of the additions, such as the buttresses and the belfry - as its orientation, suggest that it was originally an old synagogue, which possibly, after repeated expulsions, was converted into a Christian temple, where it is known that there were female communities that inhabited it, without obeying strict rules and practicing a free will, which recalls -which, of course, does not mean that it was the same case- those practices, heterodox and liberal, practiced by Crowley and his followers, in the famous Abbey of Thelema.
The question is, and here is the challenge, to provide more information about a place, already interesting in itself, so that future travelers let themselves be carried away by daydreams and speculation and perhaps one day they will also provide their own testimonies, since it is It is well known that places do not act in the same way in all people and in the variety of opinions, there is not only taste, as the saying goes, but also wealth and knowledge.
May you, traveling friends, enjoy it well.
NOTICE: Both the text and the accompanying photographs are my exclusive intellectual property and therefore are subject to my Copyright.
