Toledo, Spain: Part 2

Ah, the eagerly anticipated sequel to Toledo, Part I. Well, rest assured, part II has some enticing tidbits in store. Before I move onto the trip, I just want everyone to know that I spent three hours today reading outside in the sun. In shorts. Barefoot. In February. Now that’s why I left New England.

Now, back to the topic at hand.

The Victorio Macho museum was cool. It’s very small. They play 30 minute informational movie before you go through to see the sculptures, but uh, we all fell asleep during various parts of the film. Turns out walking around in Toledo is tiring. But eventually we went out into the sculpture garden, which was actually very lovely.

There were a few other rooms that you could go to that were off the garden, featuring more busts. Personally, my favorite part was the garden itself, with all its sunshine (it was a bit of a nippy day).

It was a nice little place. There were barely any other people around, aside from the museum employees, so we had the place all to ourselves. The Sephardic Museum was only a block or so down the street, so we decided to look in there before we had some lunch.

It’s really a gorgeous museum (and definitely worth a peek if you find yourself in Toledo). It’s located in the former El Tránsito Synagogue. It was Saturday afternoon, so admission was free. It’s a museum about the history of Jews in Spain, and there were a number of artifacts on display: beautifully detailed Torahs, maps, books, clothing. We went from the very large, very stately sanctuary to side rooms with displays and then up to the women’s gallery.

Here’s another shot, closer to where the bimah would have been (I assume).

There were quite a few visitors, a fairly steady stream wandering through. There was a man with his young daughter and he was pointing out the Torah to her, explaining and demonstrating how Jews prayed, with the swaying and saying things like, “That’s the Jewish book!” It seemed very odd in this day and age, but of course I didn’t realize Jews were only 2% of the world population until the seventh grade and at first I thought my history teacher was lying to us. There was an old-timey video upstairs (it looked like it had been done in the 1980s) in the gallery, showing visitors examples of major Jewish traditions, like a bar/bat mitzvah, a bris, a wedding. It was almost comical watching Spanish tourists stare at it.

I was starving by the time we left the museum, so we headed to a nearby hotel for some lunch. That deserves its own separate post and I will return to it, this supposedly still being a food blog and all.

We waddled out happy and full though, and we started to head over to El Greco’s house. But we were sidetracked by another synagogue, a much smaller one nearby. It was the Congregational Synagogue of Toledo, now known as Santa Maria la Blanca (because it’s owned by the Catholic Church). According to Wikipedia, which is a very knowledgeable and accurate reference tool, it was built in 1180 and is possibly the oldest synagogue in Europe still standing. It was indeed in very good shape and quite beautiful.

I love the columns.

Um, however, we noticed that there was some super weird art on display and there was an elderly nun sitting at a table along one wall. She had this beatific smile, trying to sell the items out in front of her. Apparently, she belonged to a Catholic order called María Estrella de la Mañana (Mary, Star of the Morning), which was only founded in 1999 by this formerly-Jewish man named Abraham de la Cruz. Though their order was Catholic, they were deeply invested in Israel and loved Jews. They celebrated Jewish holidays, observed Shabbat, and seemed basically like this Catholic version of Jews for Jesus (which had always confused me). She was quite wonderful though and extremely sweet.

The art, that was another story. This is what they looked like (I had to take these pictures surreptitiously):

They were all pretty much variations of this. Giant religions symbols, Jesus, many other things. These were all done by the order’s founder and boy, was I creeped out. Jesus looks like Sexy Jesus, like some sort of poster religions girls would have on their bedroom walls. There was another painting in which a little girl with dead eyes stared out at you. It was weird, man. It was weird. Luckily, each painting had a little placard in English, and one in Spanish, that explained what each symbol meant. Thank goodness the nun was old and I stole these pictures in, because they really have to be seen to be believed.

We all left feeling a little shaken by the experience and finally went to El Greco’s house as the final museum of the day. Well, not exactly El Greco’s house. He was a 17th century artist with a distinct painting style of elongated and (I’ll say it) creepy-looking figures. They’re haunting to look at. The story of the museum is that this guy bought this house, thinking it had belonged to El Greco. Wrong. It was, in fact, not El Greco’s house, but some random house but the guy had already turned it into a museum so it pretty much just stayed that way. It was neat. The house was traditionally Spanish, with an open courtyard, and then there were galleries of El Greco’s work.

By the time we left Greco’s house, it was getting to be sundown. We split up and Rebecca and I went to go find this mosque museum, while her parents perused the specialty food stores. Unfortunately, we got to the mosque too late and they had closed, so we walked around instead some of Toledo’s small side streets before finding our way back to the main plaza to buy a little marzipan and to have a snack before leaving. I had purchased a little of violet-flavored candies earlier in the day and they were quite tasty. I’m not generally a fan of flowery flavors, but this one was subtle, and they were pretty.

It bears noting that we did not visit one of Toledo’s biggest attraction, the Alcázar of Toledo, the big stone fort in the old city. But we were too exhausted by the end of the day to even try, with all the walking. It was a pretty easy day trip, though we didn’t get around to everything. But I felt like we saw almost everything worth seeing. I think I would visit again, but I feel no pressing need. It was very cool though. We got on our train at 7 and took a relaxing, short ride back to Madrid.