There is a particular kind of disorientation you get in the Mezquita. You walk in through a door that has the word Cathedral above it, and then you are standing in a forest. Six hundred and fifty-six columns, red-and-white double arches above them, stretching in every direction further than you can see clearly. The light comes from somewhere you can’t locate. For a moment, the space erases chronology.
I had read about it, of course. But reading is not the same as standing inside something.
What it was, what it became
The building started as a Visigothic church in the sixth century. Abd al-Rahman I purchased half of it, then demolished it and began building a mosque in 784. His successors expanded it three more times over two hundred years. At its height, the mosque accommodated more than twenty thousand worshippers.
In 1236, Ferdinand III took Córdoba and the mosque became a cathedral. In 1523, the chapter added a full Renaissance nave into the center of the mosque — a decision so destructive that even Charles V, who had approved it, reportedly said: “You have destroyed something unique to build something ordinary.”
The cathedral is still there, rising incongruously through the center of the building, breaking the geometry of the columns. It is jarring in a way that no photograph prepares you for.
The question of claim
I am not the first Muslim to visit and feel something complicated. There is a running controversy about whether Muslims should be allowed to pray inside the building. The Vatican and the Spanish Bishops’ Conference have consistently refused. Occasionally someone prays anyway and is asked to leave or removed by security.
I didn’t try. I’m not sure why. Partly because I didn’t want to treat a historical and political grievance as a personal spiritual exercise. Partly because I wasn’t sure what I was feeling was grief exactly, or something closer to curiosity. The building is extraordinary. The dispossession is real. These are not mutually exclusive facts.
What I did do was sit for a long time in the older section — the part Abd al-Rahman built — and try to read the space on its own terms. The columns are Roman and Visigothic, taken from earlier buildings. Even the mosque was built from the ruins of what came before. Nothing here was made from scratch.
Around the building
The old city around the Mezquita is worth a day on its own. The Jewish quarter — the judería — is a few streets of whitewashed walls and geraniums in pots, small and touristic but still beautiful in the early morning before the groups arrive. The Alcázar de los Reyes Cristianos is nearby; a fortress built in the 1320s, with Roman mosaics in the floor and a garden that was clearly designed to be better than anything you’d seen before.
I ate lunch at a place on Calle Romero, no name I could read on the outside, that served a dish I can only describe as chickpeas cooked correctly. I sat outside. The sun was strong for February.
What I brought back
I have a photograph of the columns taken from low to the ground, looking up at an angle. The red and white stripes repeat until they become pattern, almost textile. I look at it sometimes and think about the craftsmen who built this — who they prayed to, what languages they spoke, what they expected this building to be for.
I have built for you a mosque that has no equal on earth.
He was probably right, for his time. The building outlasted him by twelve centuries and is now visited by a million tourists a year. Most of them don’t know and don’t need to know its whole history. Some of them, like me, arrived with a particular claim on it, and left with something harder to name.