Frankenstein Pears

A few weeks back, we bought some Waitrose pears. It was an impulse buy. Four pears, each with that coy blush hinting at ripeness, and a warning that they had to be eaten within six days. Problem was, the were still hard, and what impulse hadn’t factored in was that we were going to Portugal in three days.

I shrugged. Win some, lose some. They’d either ripen before we left, or they wouldn’t. And if we came home to fruity necrosis and those small pesky flies, it wasn’t exactly the end of the world. 

Portugal was great, airport security less so, but we made it home safely, one thing on my mind. 

The pears. 

Yes, I know, I should have put them in the fridge.

You could imagine my puzzled relief that the four pears were where I’d left them, obdurately intact—more than that—marble hard. Not a fruit fly in sight.

I ate one of them. Tried to. Nearly broke my teeth. A week later I tried again. Same result. From then on, it became an obsession. Each morning I’d check the remaining two pears, convinced there must be some arboreal attic with a portrait of mould and decay, pears festering in an obscene grey fuzz. What we’d inadvertently brought into our house was something satanic despite their pristine appearance. I wondered about the two I’d already eaten. Were they still there, in my stomach, rock hard and impervious, too large to pass through?

I was reminded of the satanic pears when we dropped into the Cotswold village of Broadway, pretty beyond words but essentially soulless. It makes Disney World edgy. 

Photos or Broadway credit: BM Keyton.

Places like these have manifold ‘portraits’ found in the back streets of Salford, Glasgow, Birkenhead. We live in a Dorian Gray world—but the remaining two pears no longer. Two days ago, I came down to find one of them slightly discoloured at the pointy end.

 Carpe Diem!

 I washed them, cut out a nugget of something squishy and brown, and ate them before they had time to change their mind.

 

The Convent of Christ

As a reward for regaining  territories seized by the Muslims, the Templars were offered a vast territory dominated by their newly built castle. Following the extinction of the Templars, the Portuguese king founded the Order of Christ. Later, Manuel I and his son Joao III ordered the construction of the convent and the six Renaissance cloisters built around the original Temple chapel shown below

This many-sided tower  looks stark and forbidding, but hides within it a treasure chest. 

Called the Charola, the round church built by the Knights Templar in the C12th was a conscious imitation of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem. From the outside, the church is a 16-sided polygonal structure. Inside, the round church has a central octagonal design, connected by arches to a surrounding gallery or ambulatory. 

Legend has it that its distinctive shape allowed knights to attend Mass on horseback. In those early days, worship would have been stern but devout. By the end of the Renaissance, everything had changed. 

Now you find yourself  in a religious kaleidoscope of colour, ornamentation and gilt; your eye is drawn up to the crucified Christ and then upwards to the ceiling and a riot of colour. It’s in marked contrast to the stark but tasteful simplicity of the rest of the convent, most of it Renaissance added onto the original, less ornate church of the Templars. No apologies for the profusion of photos. They are worth 'blowing up' and exploring. 

 

The capitals on the central columns and the painting on stone alluding to St Christopher date to the early Templar period.

Four chapels on the ambulatory walls were built. They faced northeast, northwest, southeast, southwest respectively. 

The Portocarreiros Chapel. 

I couldn't record all I saw in the chapel but for those interested

the decorative details - especially the wonderful tiles see  here

Castle and  convent are now  surrounded by the convent wall, an area with 34 hectares of flower and vegetable gardens, and beyond, the great forest Mata dos Sete Montes. Water was supplied via a masterpiece of engineering, a 6km aqueduct extending through the valley of Pegoes. 

Some of the six cloisters for walking in prayer and peace. I found it peaceful but couldn't avoid the irreverent comparison with Gormenghast. 

The Main Cloister was built during the C16th and inspired by Italian architecture.  In the early C17th (1619) the fountain was connected to the Aqueduct. 

Then there are the endless corridors

You wonder who the mysterious figure in the distance is. As a monk, you'd know and likely be contemplating your sins as you approached.

The Suffering Christ

 I loved the way the window frames the garden like a painting.

The Crossing is in the geometric centre of the Convent, where the three corridors that make up the main dormitory meet

You can see the dormitory cells lining the walls. In the half light, it's easy to imagine tourists as monks.

One of the many dormitory cells.

The Refectory

We argued whether these were toilets or washing up facilities. 

And then of course there were steps, lots of them in every shape and form. These monks were fit—
 

—but enjoyed wonderful views between Heaven and Earth

Tomar and the Knights Templar

 

I wanted to be a Knight Templar when I was eight. It didn't come to pass

The Convent of Christ within the castle walls

Could that be Dan Brown?

The entrance to the castle. Note the plants to the left

No idea what plant this is, but it's thick as leather and attracted graffiti.

I looked for Gualdim Pais Loves Abu Yusuf al-Mansur, but without success.

The Castle gardens.

A rather nice bench, Moorish influence fairly obvious, within the Castle's garden walks.

An orange tree for those Templars partial to marmalade on toast

Walls within walls, the Convent of Christ peeping out in the background

Gardens within the walls of the castle

Outer walls

Built on a steep outcrop of impenetrable rock

Those forests could hide an army

Tomar from the battlements

And its history

The castle of the Templars in Tomar is one of the most important Portuguese military buildings of the C12th. The building of the castle began on March 1^st 1218 –the ‘Day of Tomar’ and was designed to defend the borderlands from Muslim incursions. Its builder was Gualdim Pais, Master of the Knights Templar. He was still working on it in 1160, and in 1190 it was put to the test when the armies of Abu Yusuf al-Mansur attacked the castle in force. By the early C13th Tomar had become a Templar owned town, and Gualdim’s statue dominates its central square.

The Knights Templar became a supra European organisation of vast wealth and power, its tentacles  everywhere and becoming even more powerful as the years passed. It’s one of history’s great ‘what ifs’ —what if the Knights Templar had continued to grow? How might it have changed history. 

But, as every schoolchild knows, the Templars were brutally disbanded by Philip ‘The Fair’ of France. Desperately short of money and with the Pope in his back pocket (Avignon) he accused The Templars of foul heresies, satanism, and spitting on the crucifix amongst other heinous crimes. In 1307, every Templar in France was arrested on the same day. 

The process of destroying such a powerful order took some time and considerable savagery, but by 1314 it was over. In that year, Jacques de Moley, Grand Master of the Templars was burnt at the stake, but not before laying a curse on the Pope and the French king. Pope Clement V died in April, a month after the Grand Master. His body was placed in a church overnight; the church caught fire and Clement was burnt to a cinder. Philip IV lived a little longer, dying in November that year, broken, it is said by the immorality of his daughters, and perhaps remembering the Templar’s curse.   

Though disbanded elsewhere, things were a little different in Portugal, where King Dinis persuaded Pope Clement’s successor, John XXII, to create a new organisation: the Order of Christ. This new Order took over Templar assets as well as  its membership, the Knights Templar carrying on, as it were, under a different name. It assumed control of the great fortress of Tomar in 1357 and over the years added to it—a new cloister in 1557 being one of the best examples of Renaissance architecture in Portugal.  

Within the castle is the great Convent of Christ that boasts a fabulous mix of Gothic, Arab and later Renaissance elements, worth a final post next week.