Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
~1st Amendment to the United States Constituion
I suppose it is natural to understand the new by comparison with the familiar. (Hence Portugal story-telling through allusions.) I recognized there how much I was viewing things as an American. Our first morning, we grabbed an “ethnocentric breakfast” from Starbucks -- apparently coffee in paper cups is an American thing and not done in Portugal. And while I came away thinking that coffee in real mugs is a very civilized thing, that was our first day and we slept in and needed coffee and to make our tour on time. At that point, the idea that I couldn’t walk into a coffee shop and get a cup to carry out was a little bizarre.
Coffee was not the most distinctive way that I was American, though some of the other differences helped me understand “American” a little better. We learned from Day 1 that Portugal is very in touch with its history… and its history is older than anything we know. In 1755, an earthquake shook Lisbon and destroyed an ancient city -- at a time when our oldest cities were still rather nascent.
I’m used to playing tourist at monuments, museums, and parks, not churches, palaces, and castles. But when your history stretches back a thousand years, those are the places to see. The first stone cathedral we visited was in the Lisbon cathedral, which impressed me with its cavernous interior. The Captain, having seen (and sung in) European stone churches before, was less easily awed. And two days later I discovered why.
The monastery of St. Jerome in Lisbon was built by Henry the Navigator as a thank you for the safe return of an expedition. We came straight from the tiny village houses of Fatima into the stone and gold and marble richness of the Prince’s thank you. My mind flew in several vaguely formed directions at once:
*The disparity! The contrast of royalty to peasant, rich to poor. I understood the Protestant Reformation and other rebellions against the Church so much better. This point was brought home even more when we visited the Church of São Francisco in Porto, which was covered in 900 pounds of gold leaf.
*Wow -- I wish I could thank God like that. It’s hard to imagine having the kind of gratitude, let alone the resources, to give a mountain-sized church to God. I could use a lesson in gratitude. My thank-you gift to Him tends to be something more akin to a Glory-Be, or a decade of the Rosary, or Mass if I’m really ambitious.
*The First Amendment. Not only was the church built by a prince, but by-gone royalty lined the transepts, born in marble tombs on the backs of marble elephants. As I got a clearer picture of the intertwined nature of Church and State, I began to see a tad better what our forefathers did not want -- in terms of both religion and royalty.
The same musings on the foundation of our country struck me when we visited the National Coach Museum. The Captain had much more enthusiasm about it than I did -- I thought I was going to the medieval equivalent of a car show. I misunderstood the purpose of the coaches. Functionally, of course, they took royalty from point A to point B. But the purpose… to show off. So the coaches were covered with elaborate woodwork, gold leaf, and detailed paintings and upholstered in velvet. The purpose was beauty, but obviously more than beauty -- to impress upon the viewer the wealth and status of the owner.
The former stock-exchange, the Stock Exchange Palace, incidentally, was a way for the country to say the same thing. The whole building was impressive, but one room in particular, the Arabic Room, was created to make sure foreign visitors had a visceral experience of the wealth of the nation. The brightly-colored room glistens with Moorish-inspired detailed patterns of red and blue, outlined with gold leaf.
The whole impression of these structures was to overwhelm in a way that none of our stark, Romanesque national monuments possibly could -- we were built on escaping royalty. A bunch of idealistic, democratic rebels.
I hate to give America the final word in a series about Portugal. Since a picture is worth a thousand words, here is a photographic offering to end our adventures:
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| Portugal, the Atlantic Ocean, and a castle, as seen from a palace |
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