Dear Reader, one of the best things about travel is that the days from which you expect the least often turn out to be the best days of a trip. Today was a perfect example, as we were not expecting much. The plan was to meet Gilmar in the morning for a leisurely stroll through Cusco, including a visit to the main city market, take a siesta, then spend the afternoon visiting Inca sites. This didn’t sound all that appealing given yesterday’s tough travel day, but at a minimum the morning’s walk sounded good, so rather than take the day off we went ahead with the plan. As it turned out, we underestimated the morning, and were just flat wrong about the afternoon.
A walk through Cusco is a walk past churches, as the city has 16 major ones and innumerable smaller ones. To the trained eye (or people walking with a guide who has a trained eye), it is also a study in Spanish takeover of Inca architecture. Almost everywhere you look in the old city you will find Inca walls up to 2-3 feet, then significantly less sophisticated stonework on top where the Spanish repurposed Inca buildings. The difference in quality between the two is visible even after several hundred years. As the day went on we learned a tremendous amount about Incan architecture and my esteem for it grew. The key for the Incas was to account for and build around two of the dominant geological features of the area – bedrock limestone and granite, and frequent earthquakes. To avoid getting shaken down, most Inca buildings are either carved directly into bedrock, or built immediately on top of it, allowing them to both survive the force of an earthquake and avoid fault lines.
Indeed, one of the sites we visited was maybe 100 yards away from the fault line from a major earthquake that hit Cusco in 1986, with the miles-long depression running right beside the site, but absolutely no damage to the structure itself. Another surprising feature is that while most Inca construction involved carved blocks fitting together with no mortar and simply relying on the weight of the blocks themselves to stay together, later Inca architecture had blocks carved in almost lego-like fashion to interlock with one another at key stress points in their buildings. Given their skill with stonemasonry it shouldn’t be surprising that they would have come up with the idea for interlocking blocks, but it is impossible to know how they understood where in their buildings the key stress points would lie since this is a very complex calculation even using modern computers and not something that is necessarily intuitive.
Dear Reader, I am willing to admit that it is possible that you are not as interested in the intricacies of Incan stonemasonry as myself, so I’ll return to the travelogue. Our first stop on the morning’s walk was the market, which was identical to the “old market”, “old bazaar”, “main market” or “caravanserai” everywhere in the world, with the substitution of local produce. Cusco apparently doesn’t have any supermercados, so Cuscanians do most of their shopping at markets like this one, which was evident in our ability to pick up some socks for TBJ (who was running law). The main difference between this market and its doppelgängers in Laos, Mali, Istanbul, Skopje and Camden Town was the unbelievable, unfathomable, absolutely overwhelming variety of corn and potatoes. If you like these two vegetables, which I do, this market and Peru in general are paradise.
After the market we headed up to a still working monastery located in what was once the absolute heart of the Inca Empire. In Incan times and for modern tourist purposes, the site is called Qorikancha, but the monks that live there are Catholic and so refer to it as Convento de Santa Domingo del Cusco, or the Dominican Convent in Cusco. This site is what sparked much of the previous discussion about stonemasonry, so in the interest of your attention I will skip much of what I have to say about Qorikancha. After we left Qorikancha, we strolled over to the Cusco Cathedral, which is actually comprised of three Catholic churches built adjacent to each other. The second most interesting thing that we saw in the Cathedral was a procession in which the Lord of the Earthquakes, the “Dark Christ” or “Black Jesus” of Cusco, was moved from his normal resting place in the cathedral to a point in the center alter in anticipation of an Easter Monday procession through the streets of town. One should feel free to google this for more information on the Lord of the Earthquakes, as his is a very interesting story, but to my mind it pales in comparison to the most interesting thing about the Cathedral.
The most interesting thing about the Cathedral, and indeed one of the most interesting parts of the trips, is that the Cathedral in Cusco is sort of the ultimate embodiment of the syncretism between Incan and Spanish / Catholic influences that was hinted at by the church in Chinchero, and the brilliantly subversive religious art of the Cusco school. More mundane examples of this syncretism follow those I mentioned earlier from the Chinchero murals – angel wings in Technicolor like those of the macaw rather than the traditional white, the Virgin Mary wearing triangular robes representing sacred mountains, etc. However, the deeper one looks the more one sees subtle Incan signs everywhere. One of my favorites was in a huge and stunningly carved choir that must have taken years to carve with constant priestly oversight. Tucked into the carvings on each chair, however, were figures of naked pregnant women – an Incan fertility symbol and one with absolutely no place in a Catholic church. Similarly, each seat was decorated with the faces of cherubs which, traditionally, would have been wearing halos. However, in this choir, each of the hundreds of cherubs had a scallop shell above its head. The effect is very subtle, but obvious once notices, and is incorporated because even today shells are used as offerings in a commonplace ceremony conducted by native Cuscanians prior to planting a new crop to ask for fertile soil from the earth. It blows my mind that the local carvers were able to get away with including this imagery in such a traditional catholic object as a carved choir.
Taken alone, any one of these would have gone unnoticed, but these images pervaded the artwork throughout all of the cathedrals and churches in Cusco. What’s more surprising is that a lot of the images were not nearly so subtle. For instance, in nearly every painting featuring Roman soldiers, the soldiers were shown in conquistador armour. I would think that the message here would be pretty clear to the Catholic priests, but somehow they missed it. Even more amazingly, there is an enormous painting of the last supper in the main area of the Cusco Cathedral in which Incan images about, from a set of three windows featuring images of the heavens, mountains and a cave – the three “worlds” of the Incas – to the supper being very clearly a guinea pig rather than whatever is normally shown in the last supper. Even more impressively, the face of Judas is the face of Francisco Pizarro!
To really understand how amazing this sort of thing is, you have to realize that Cusco was an absolute center of the Spanish inquisition in South America as it was for many years the most important Spanish town in the Andes. The artists that made these paintings and carvings risked their own lives and the lives of their families to keep their traditions alive, and those struggles (albeit at much lower risk) are still going on today. The procession of the Lord of the Earthquakes every Easter is an example – a flower used as an offering in Incan rituals on the same day has been incorporated and woven into the Black Jesus’ crown. Even today, within the main Cathedral, tradition has been for those who identified more closely with the Spanish to turn right upon entering, wash themselves in a fountain, and make the sign of the cross; those who identified more closely as Andean turned left, touched a particular stone that had been placed in the church in the 1600s, and then made the sign of the cross. Just within the last year, the Bishop of the Cathedral in Cusco has taken measures to force all of his parishioners away from the stone and to the Iberian fountain, going so far as to rope off the stone and then put a heavy crane in front of it. Even today this culture war thrives, so it is really amazing to me that the mestizo artists and craftsmen of the 1600s and 1700s were able to include such subversive messages in works taking pride of place in one of the most important Catholic seas in the New World.
After a good 2 hour nap for TBJ (and the Lady), we met Gilmar for the last guided portion of our trip – a tour of four Inca sites very close to Cusco. The first site is an enormous fortress called Sacsayhuaman that covers over 3000 acres. Despite being the source of building blocks for most of the Spanish buildings in Cusco, the site remains huge, and both the scale of the fortress and the scale of the building stones is remarkable. Now, Sacsayhuaman is mostly a park consisting of large green fields interspersed with Inca walls. One of our great delights was watching TBJ chase a baby Alpaca who was just as into irrationally exuberant running as TBJ, and seeing him pester a whole pack(?) of the beasts. This was nothing short of awesome. Our last two sites were called Tambomachay, a water temple with fountains fed from a diverted stream that still function 500 years after construction, and Qenqo, a large hilltop carved into a complicated set of stairs and channels and built over a natural cave. Both of these sites were quite interesting, but Gilmar let us in on something at Qenqo that really surprised me. Apparently the Incas artificially mummified some of their dead (I say artificially because the dry climate on the Lima side of the Andes naturally mummifies many bodies). At some point, someone tested one of these mummies and discovered that the mummification process utilized a plant that continues to be used to preserve meat even to this day, so the Incas were quite ahead of their time in this regard. The really cool fact, however, is that this plant cannot be grown in South America – it is only found in Polynesia. Although I was aware of Thor Hyerdall’s Kon-Tiki expedition and his theory that Polynesia was founded by people from South America, it still blew me away how much cross-pollination Gilmar was able to cite between the two cultures – from statutes in the Lake Titicaca region that are nearly identical to tiki statutes, to chicken bones date to well before the European discovery of the content, to the genetic makeup of Easter Islanders.
One of the things I enjoy most about travel is learning that linkages and relationships between cultures were being built centuries and even millennia before we might otherwise think. I kind of default to a view that 1000 years ago the world was a lonely place in which one could spend one’s life having never met anyone from outside your village unless it was in a raid in which your village was mostly wiped out. The idea that chickens were being traded between Polynesians and South Americans, statues were being built incorporating each other’s artwork, and genes were being passed back and forth in the usual way, is something that I just love.
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