It has always been said, that a picture is worth a thousand words.
From that point of view and even the inflection caused by Gütemberg with the invention of the printing press, the stone was, basically for millennia, the vehicle that transmits Culture and Knowledge.
The medieval stonemasons, skilled craftsmen also in the art of carving, were, in their own way, the master executors of a message specially created to channel the people, illiterate and without possibilities of access to Culture, towards the convenient knowledge of a religion, Christianity, whose influence would relegate to oblivion what could well be considered as the Old Religion.
Sometimes in a naive, childish way even if possible, but extremely graphic, the patient molded from the stone, offered visions, fun or frightening as the case may be, of the main passages of the Old and New Testaments.
Some of the most endearing, can be located inside the church of the old soriano monastery of San Juan de Duero.
Among the passages represented, because of their uniqueness, they may call more attention, those dedicated to the terrible beast, the seven-headed hydra - representative of the seven deadly sins and terror of medieval society - the execution of St. John the Baptist as a result of the manipulations of the perfidious Salome and the Massacre of the Innocents, where the artist represented the Devil himself suggesting the macabre idea to an undecided but greedy for power, King Herod.
NOTICE: Both the text and the accompanying photographs are my exclusive intellectual property.