Toledo: Mosques, Synagogues, and Churches

Toledo has lots of beautiful churches. We first visited the Mosque of Cristo de la Luz. It’s an old mosque, built in December of the year 999 AD. It has beautiful structure, and was turned into a Christian church in the 11th century. Legend has it, though, that El Cid was leaving the city right as he was exiled, (while the mosque was still a… well, Mosque) and his horse, who was just as spiritual as El Cid, stopped in front of the mosque and kneeled down. Everyone, knowing how spiritual the horse was, went into the mosque and started trying to figure out why he would’ve kneeled down. After tearing out a few walls, they found an old picture of Christ with a candle that was still burning. The horse had felt the presence of Christianity in the mosque, and subsequently the Mosque was turned into a church. It’s still unclear why everyone decided to start tearing off the sides of the mosque after the horse kneeled, or how the candle hadn’t gone out after the mosque already having been standing for some two hundred years. But this is a picture of the legendary stone where El Cid’s horse knelt down.

We went to a Mozarabic church next. Mozarabic describes the Christians who lived within the Arab kingdom and didn’t convert to Islam. They remained Christian but were pretty well assimilated into Arab culture and architecture. There’s lots of Visigoth influence as well, which means the earliest churches in Toledo were Aryan churches as opposed to Roman Catholic (In the council of Nicaea, two bishops had argued their main points on the nature of the Godhead, the order of baptism and a few other doctrinal points. Bishop Aryus lost the debate, and subsequently his rival bishop had him excommunicated for heresy. He still had some followers, however, who were of the Aryan church. 

The architecture was beautiful.

We visited a convent next, which contained lots of El Greco paintings, and is actually the church where he did most of his work, and also is the place where he was buried. The paintings were beautiful, and we had some great marzipan that the nuns sold us. It was way better than any marzipan I’d ever had!

After lunch, we went to a Jewish synagogue. Something that was pretty interesting was that Sephardi is the Jewish name for Spain- hence the Sephardic Jews (one of the two major Jewish groups in Europe) is from Spain. The synagogue was really pretty with beautiful details in the carving on the walls.In keeping with the unique culture mixing of Toledo, the synagogue is named for the Virgin Mary.

The church of los Reyes is a church commissioned and built for Isabel and Ferdinand (Isabel is viewed almost as the George Washington for her unification of half of Spain and for completing the Reconquista). She and Ferdinand commissioned the church so they could be buried there, but after Granada was conquered they went and visited the city, and discovered they liked Granada just as much as Toledo and elected to be buried there. The church is full of symbols connecting both to religious motifs.

Toledo’s Jewish area is famous for the crafting of gold. I visited a shop where a man still makes all of his medallions and plates by hand. They were stunning.

We visited a few more churches and saw a couple other famous El Greco paintings. The city was absolutely beautiful as a whole. Toledo was my favorite place I’ve visited so far! Apparently a bullet train can get you there from Madrid in about 30 minutes, so hopefully on one of these free days I’ll be able to go back and explore some more.