Day 5
I am today years old when I learned that I am the kind of person who will add 2 miles to an already 15 mile day to see “the weird church.” We all know already I’m the kind of person to have two guidebooks for the same thing, right? They both said Santa Maria de Eunate was unmissable. (If you really know me, you know that I actually have THREE but the digital version wasn’t available so I didn’t bring it!)
The detour was at the end of the day, however, so at about 3 pm I found myself sitting on a bench at the trail fork, trying to decide if I had enough energy to go for it. This was fortuitous because every pilgrim that came to the fork immediately stopped and looked in either direction and asked me in a variety of languages which way they should go. I explained in English or broken Spanish that the normal path was to my right and the church detour was to the left, and gave a quick commercial for the church. (“You get the pilgrim discount! It’s just 1 euro!” Etc.) After a half dozen of these interactions, I had convinced myself, I guess. Must have been a good commercial!
After a blissfully flat walk alongside red bell pepper fields, there it was, smaller than I thought it was going to be but very striking all by itself on the hill. Although I had a decent detour to get to it, church would have probably been on the original (one of the original) pilgrimage paths, as archeologist have found very old pilgrim graves here (the sea shells, a thousand-year-old symbol of the Camino, buried with them gives it away). When I refer to Eunate as the “weird” church it’s because nobody really knows who built it and there’s some architectural oddballness. It’s 800 years old, shaped like an octagon, has a ring wall of 33 arches, and so perfectly made it looks like the masons finished the last stone just before siesta time this afternoon. The romantic notion is that it’s a Templar (shortest definition: intense Catholic military dudes, 1000s-1300s) church, because those folks spent a lot of time in the Holy Land and octagon churches are more common there, and because there’s some talk of them being fixated on “sacred numbers” (3, 33, 8, 100), of which the architecture of this church reflects. If you walk around the church in prayer 3 times for example, you’re passing 33 arches 3 times so that’s 99, and when you pass the final arch (the church doorway) that makes it 100. See how people amused themselves before tv?
The church current administrators do not embrace all this dreamy speculation. I went to the church website today and the tone in any language is very much the following: “Calm down about the Templars, guys, just come in an pray like it’s a normal church, please.”
(Stay tuned on more updates about the Templars! The current audio book is about Spanish government and the one after that is Queen Isabella and then it’s Templars Templars Templars all across the Meseta so I should be an expert by the time I’m in Ponferrada and reach the big Templar castle there.)
