De um historiador britânico que visitou Tomar antiga. Chegou num dia de festa, esteve hospedado no Hotel União, conheceu o senhor José Matias de Araújo, descreveu a cidade e a sua gente, bebeu o melhor vinho da região, contou a sua história e fez umas ilustrações fabulosas.
Em Edimburgo, Escócia, no ano de 1907, é impressa a obra THROUGH PORTUGAL escrita pelo britânico Martin Hume (1847-1910) e publicada em Nova Iorque pela MCClure, Phillips Company.
Tenho uma particular amizade por Edimburgo, cada vez maior.
Martin Hume faz uma descrição sobre "a pequena cidade que nunca esquecerá até ao final dos seus dias."
Eis uma quadra da obra dedicada a Portugal:
“Oh Christ! it is a goodly sight to see
What heaven hath done for this delicious land;
What fruits of fragrance blush on every tree,
What goodly prospects o’er the hills expand.”
Byron.
Há um capítulo dedicado a Tomar, com ilustrações preciosas feitas pelo mesmo, que permitem uma viagem no tempo.
Tenho dúvidas sobre a data da viagem do Sr. Hume, talvez tenha acontecido ainda em finais do século XIX.
Aqui fica na integra o capítulo dedicado a Thomar, onde há descrições encantadoras e ilustrações intemporais da autoria de S.A. Forrest, ilustrador que terá acompanhado Hume na viagem a Portugal.
A COUNTRY RAILWAY STATION.
And so the team kicked their hardest all the seven miles to Thomar, and performed the distance, as it seemed to me, in one continued 143gymnastic exercise, more on their fore-legs than on their full complement of limbs. But kicking mules were powerless to mar the delight of the drive. The road was a perfect one, over hills covered with pines and dales ablaze with purple heather. The cool mountain breeze, laden with the scent of wild thyme, brought with it a new sense of delight which made breathing a conscious enjoyment, and the jaded elderly person in the shivering shandrydan felt impelled to shout aloud in mere exhilaration of living in such an atmosphere. Only a three weeks before I had seen Deeside at its best, but Deeside heather was dull, and the Deeside pine-clad hills in their wreaths of clouds were depressing, in comparison with this sparkling sweep of sandy moor and mountain.
Turning the shoulder of the highest ridge we came in sight of the vast and beautiful valley below us with Thomar in its midst upon its river bank nestling in greenery, with its steep, abrupt hill and castle standing sentinel over it. It was Sunday, and, although broad daylight when I drove into Thomar, a flight of rockets rushed into the air from the town-hall, and the braying of a brass band told me that the town was en fête. It was, I learnt, 144the ceremony of prize-giving and treating the school children by the town council, and all the little ones, clean, chubby, and well-clad they looked, were trooping, shouting, and cheering, as children do the world over. I found a warm welcome at the Hotel União, and was soon convinced that the Chão de Maçãs meeting was right in their assurance that the failure to send the carriage was from no fault of the host, a gentleman of cultured manners and tastes, quite unlike the ordinary type of Portuguese innkeeper. He was distressed to have received no letter to advise him of my coming, as he ought to have done two days before, but an hour or two afterwards he rushed into my room, excited and triumphant. He had forced them to open the post-office, Sunday though it was, and had rescued my letter from a heap which some careless postman had neglected to deliver! Thenceforward Senhor Jose Mathias Araujo, a pattern of Portuguese hotelkeepers, was indefatigable in making me, a mere passing stranger though I was, of whose name he had only heard vaguely, feel at home and comfortable at Thomar.
A CORNER OF THE TOWN HALL AND THE CONVENT, THOMAR.
The place is one which to my latest days I shall never forget. A clean little rectangular 145town with straight streets of singularly modern aspect, on the banks of an exquisitely beautiful stream fringed by trees and gardens. The shops for the most part are but doorways open upon the street, for they have not adopted the modern fashion of windows for the display of goods. And life in general seems to pass drowsily, for with the exception of a small factory in some ancient conventual buildings on the farther bank of the stream, there is not much doing in the place.
But the object of my coming to this sweet, dull, little town pervades it everywhere. At the end of the three straight streets running from the river to the square market-place, with its ancient church and town-hall, there looms upon a steep hill, right up over the roofs as it seems, the most splendid and interesting mediæval castle-monastery in this land of hill-top strongholds—the ancient fortress headquarters of the crusading knights of the Order of Christ, successors in Portugal of the Templars. Thomar was the metropolis and fief of the Order, and on all sides the emblem of their peculiar cross is evident. Impressed upon my mind for ever is the view as I first gazed upon it from the146main street (of course, incongruously called now after Serpa Pinto) on the sparkling autumn day. Clear and sharp high up on the hill against the indigo sky stood a ruined bell tower through whose gaping window the light shone, with tall, pointed cypresses by its side, and flanked by a mighty stretch of warm, grey battlements, above which rose the bulk of a great square keep.
A zigzag path leads from behind the sixteenth-century town-hall in the praça up the rocky sides of the precipitous hill. Gnarled olive trees, dwarf oaks, and aloes grew in the crevices and amidst the ruins of outer walls upon the face of the declivity; and the outer donjon, still standing unwrecked across the path, shows the tremendous strength even of these exterior defences. Above these loomed the Titanic walls, their battlemented sides and turrets, all stained a golden yellow with the lichen that covered them. The inner donjon, which adjoins the picturesque ruined bell tower, gives entrance to a charming grassy garden with tall cypresses, orange trees, and gay flowers, growing in what was once the wide courtyard of the castle; and the huge square main keep standing in the midst, all dismantled as it is, rears its flame-tinged battlements as proudly as when the soldiers of the Cross held this isolated stronghold against the hordes of Islam. The walls are everywhere pierced with loopholes in the shape of a cross surmounting a globe, and the cruciform device of the Order is graven upon stones on all sides.
SOME BEAUTIES OF THOMAR.
147Connected with the walls of the ancient castle, and upon a somewhat higher level than the keep, there stands the high round church of the Templars, with buttresses of immense strength reaching to the parapet, and a crumbling square bell tower upon one of its faces. Upon an ancient slab let into the sides of the church an inscription tells how Dom Affonso, first King of Portugal, and Gualdrim Paes, master of the Portuguese Templars, constructed this edifice in 1108. Joined to this ancient structure is one of the most astounding specimens of Manueline architecture in Portugal, built in the early sixteenth century, when all the country was pulsating with new life and eager longings. It is the choir and chapter-house, and behind them is the ruin of the great monastery of the Order of Christ. Words are weak to convey an idea of 148the capricious splendour of the choir and chapter-house so far as they remain undefaced, for later ages have done their best to spoil the edifice. Eight cloisters have been built around it, and tacked on to it, by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Its lovely Manueline doorway has been marred, and the east end of the building blocked as high as its upper windows by the “Cloister of the Philips.”
The Choir and Chapter-House, Thomar.
But notwithstanding all the vandalism, enough of the Manueline building remains intact to strike the beholder with reverent wonder at the intricate beauty of the work, and the inexhaustible invention of the design. The doorway stands in a recess reaching to the parapet, and enclosed within an arch of surprising beauty, of which the under curve is lined with an elaborate pendent ornament. Within the recess filling the whole space and over the door itself, figures in niches stand under canopies and upon pillars in which caprice and intricacy surpass themselves. Coiled cables, bossed spirals, floreated pinnacles, armillary spheres, crosses, and intertwined branches, stand out in high relief and under cut, as if the sculptors had purposely sought difficulties in order to overcome them. 149The arch of the door itself is beyond description, so luxuriant is the design of the chiselled stone which forms the three grooves and two spiral pilasters around it. The parapet of the whole edifice is similarly rich, alternating the cross of the Order with the armillary sphere; and although most of the lower part of the walls is hidden, the view of the east end with its two corner towers, as seen from the roof of the adjoining cloister, is magnificent. The lower window, which lights the interior of the choir, is a massive tangle of outstanding cables; each point being crowned by the cross and the armillary sphere which formed the device of the grand master, the famous Prince Henry the Navigator. Around one of the corner towers a great chain cable, each link carved entire in stone, is braced, and around the other an equally tremendous buckled belt, representing the Order of the Garter, which the Prince, a Plantagenet on his mother’s side, possessed. The upper window which lights the chapter-house is more suggestive still. It is a highly decorated circular light bevilled into the deep thickness of the wall, and represents upon the sloping inner face of the 150circle a series of bulging staysails, each held down by a rope.
But all this description in detail is incapable of conveying an idea of the richness of effect produced by the whole work. The exuberance of the style and its tricky capriciousness may be, and are, condemned by purists as in questionable taste; but as an outcome of national feeling, and as an example of original inventive ingenuity and patience, this and other notable specimens of the style, to which reference will be made later, are of the highest interest to the student, and a delight to the ordinary observer who can free himself from the straightlaced traditions of the schools.
Inside the grave old round church of the Templars, to which this gorgeous edifice was to serve as a choir for the warrior monks of Christ, a fine Byzantine altar stands in the centre. The interior of the edifice itself is a quaint and curious mixture of Byzantine, Moorish, Romanesque, and Gothic, the pillars being painted and gilt in oriental taste, whilst the splendid canopy over the central altar is pure Gothic, and dated 1500. In four of the eleven arched spaces upon the wall of the circular church there are some151ancient pictures of the highest interest, the remaining seven having been stolen by the French invaders in the Napoleonic wars. The paintings are fine enough to be by the hand of Jan Van Eyck himself, and are, as usual, ascribed by Portuguese to the mythical Gran Vasco. It is far more likely, however, that they may be the work of a painter called Jean Dralia of Bruges, who was living in this monastery at the end of the fifteenth century, and is buried here. It is lamentable to see the condition to which these masterpieces have been allowed to fall from sheer want of care; and unless they are promptly rescued, a few years more will complete their ruin.
The great choir, added on to the round church, presents in its interior the same wealth of fancy as that already described on the outside; but the wonderful choir stalls of the Manueline period were stolen or destroyed during the French invasion. As I stood under the exquisitely carved ceiling of this choir, looking towards the Byzantine altar in the round church before me, my mind flew back to a scene enacted here in April 1581, which I had more than once endeavoured to describe in writing 152without having seen the place. Philip II. had followed in the devastating steps of Alba to wrest from the native Portuguese pretender the crown he coveted. Portugal had sullenly bent its neck to the yoke, and the nobles had either been exiled or bought to the side of the Spaniard. But one thing more was needed to make grim Philip legally King of Portugal as well as King of Spain. The Portuguese Cortes, elected of the people, though in this case elected with Alba’s grip upon its throat, had to swear allegiance to the new monarch, and Philip had to pledge his oath to respect the rights and liberties of his new subjects. The stronghold of the Knights of Christ at Thomar was chosen by the Spaniard for the crowning act of Portuguese national subjection; and here Philip arrived on the 15th March 1581. On the 3rd April, in one of those charming little letters to his orphan daughters, he wrote from Thomar saying that the Cortes would sit soon, for many people were already arriving, and the oaths would be taken as soon as they were met. “You have heard,” he says, “that they insist upon my dressing in brocade, much against my will, but they say it is the custom here.”
153On the 16th of April the church of the monastery was aglow with shimmer of gold and gems and rich stuffs. Under a dais at the end of this choir Philip sat in a robe of cloth of gold over a dress of crimson brocade; though his heart was sad for the death of his last wife, and he hated splendour in his broken old age. After mass had been said, the Cortes did homage and swore to keep their faith to him as king; and then stepping down from the throne, he advanced to the high altar and solemnly pledged his word to respect the laws and liberties of Portugal. How little he relished the splendour is seen in a letter he sent to his girls from Thomar a fortnight later, as soon as he could find time to write to those whom he loved more dearly than any other creatures on earth. “How much I wish,” he wrote, “you could have seen the ceremony of taking the oath from a window as my nephew [the Archduke Albert] did, who saw everything excellently. But I send you a full account of it all.... I have given the Golden Fleece to the Duke of Braganza, and he went with me to mass, both of us wearing the collar of the Order; which upon my mourning looked very bad, and I can 154tell you he looked much smarter than I did, although they say that the day of the oath was the first time he had worn low shoes, though everybody is wearing them here now except myself.” Thomar, for the last time in its existence, was a blaze of splendour for those six feverish weeks; for Spanish and Portuguese nobles, jealous of each other, vied in lavish expenditure; and then the fortress of the Knights was left to its solitude: gradually royal encroachments stripped the Order of its wealth and power, and Thomar lived in memory alone.
The upper chamber of the Manueline building over the choir is the chapter-house of the Order of Christ. A grand, low, pillared hall, with the twisted cables and the repeated cross and sphere, testifying once more to the reigning idea of the period of the Navigator Grand-Master. Here it was that the Portuguese Cortes sat to confirm the religious act of allegiance to Philip, and set the seal of subservience upon the nation for nearly a century. Every carved stone and crocket has a story to tell if we could but hear it. Here in the older monastic building the Navigator himself held his chapters, dwelling in the adjoining palace, in the intervals of his 155life-task upon his eyrie at Sagres; here in the “cloisters of the Philips,” dull Philip III. held his monastic court upon his one visit to Portugal; and the magnificent cloister of John III. testifies to the classical reaction after the exuberance of the times of his father Dom Manuel.
In the quaint little Gothic cloister around the burial-place of the monks, called the “Cloister of Dom Henrique,” a strange sight is to be seen in the upper ambulatory. Baltasar de Faria was the instrument of Philip II. in forcing the Spanish form of Inquisition ruthlessly upon Portugal, and in cruelty surpassed his master. So bitterly hated was he that the saying ran that earth itself would reject and refuse to assimilate the body of such a monster. In the lid of a stone coffin in the cloister a pane of glass is set, and he who will may gaze and see how Baltasar de Faria looks now. He was a splendid courtier in his time, and doubtless a gallant-looking one too, for it was a sumptuous age; but the poor gentleman’s looks have now little to recommend them, as he lies contorted and mummified but perfect in his narrow home, to be gazed and wondered at by those who list—a scoff for the ribald, a text for the moralist.
156More there was, much more, to describe in this wonderful monastery, but I have said more than enough to prove that the visitor to Portugal who misses Thomar has failed to see a relic, which, in its way, has hardly an equal in Europe. The drives around Thomar are exquisitely beautiful, the view from the hill across the river embracing the monastery and the great white sanctuary of the Misericordia, with its long scala sacra, upon the twin hill, being one never to be forgotten. Just outside the town, hard by an ancient pillar marking the junction place of the armies which won for a second time the independence of Portugal from Spain (at Aljubarrota, 1385), there stands the beautiful old church of Santa Maria, a perfect Gothic fane; and close to its west end a strong tower built as a place of refuge for its constructors against the constant attacks of the Moors. Much I should like to linger upon Thomar: upon the quaint garb of the peasants, the picturesque bits of the old Manueline church of St. João in the praça, upon the lovely private gardens by the side of the stream, upon the noble aqueduct, and upon the sweet tranquillity of the acacia-shaded walks; but I dare not delay further, for the carriage is at the door of the humble though hospitable, Hotel União, to carry me on this brilliant morning the twenty-five miles to Leiria, where I must pass the night. As we drove clear of the town the loveliness of its situation came home to one with more intensity than ever. The peaceful stream winding through the plain, its course marked by a continuous line of poplars, the pine-clad hills all around—miles away but in this clear air seeming within touching distance of the hand—the cluster of white and pink houses with red roofs, and, almost sheer above them, the two hills, one crowned by its never-to-be-forgotten monastery-castle with its long battlemented walls, its high keep, and, most striking of all, its gaunt bell tower, with its guard of tall cypresses; whilst climbing up the gentler green slope of the other hill is the snow-white scala sacra of twenty-five flights of steps leading to the gleaming sanctuary of the Misericordia. Above all a sky of deep luminous blue, and pervading all the soft warm air, sweet with the scent of thyme, basil, cistus, and pines.
CHURCH OF ST. JOÃO IN THE PRAÇA, THOMAR.
157Thus, for two hours or more, I drove over a good road, winding round the foot of rising hills, and following the sinuosity of fertile valleys, 158above me grey boulders, around me pines, olives, and sweeps of flowering heather on the red earth. At length, afar off, there loomed a bolder hill than the rest, rising abruptly and crowned by another great fortress, as it seemed at an unscalable height, with a cluster of ancient houses nestled just beneath it. Patience and a scarped road on the hillside, however, enabled us to reach without apparent difficulty half up the hill to the modern village of Ourem, where a rest for the horses and a meal for myself had been agreed upon. The place was dead, basking in the hot sunshine, all the village, as it seemed, baked to the uniform yellowish-white colour of the soil of the hill upon which it stood. The gaunt yellow castle above[1] softened only by the verdure of a crown of pines, and just below its walls the ancient town and a great monastery of long ago.
THE BRIDGE AT THOMAR.
159The hostelry was humble enough, but a chatty, shrewd-looking, old lady provided an excellent luncheon for me in an upper room, and became charmingly friendly when I praised her wine, of which she was very proud, and with reason, grown, as she told me, in the vineyard at the back of the house, and as good a wine of its sort as I care to drink. She was equally pleased with the approval of her quince marmalade, and pressed no end of home-made confections upon her passing guest, whilst she kept repeating that “os senhores ingleses que veem sempre alabão muito o nosso vinho;” for the approval of Englishmen in this country is always taken as fixing the final seal of excellence upon anything.
Outside in the main street of the town complete quiet reigned in the fierce sunshine of midday. Against the indigo sky the immense castle on its peak showed clear, as nothing is ever seen in our mist-laden atmosphere. A man passes, bearing a great boat-shaped basket piled with big black grapes, the bloom upon them still undisturbed; four cronies in black nightcaps and with long staves in their hands gossip in the parallelogram of black shadow thrown athwart the road by the church tower; and, by-and-by, 160three lithe damsels with bright yellow head-kerchiefs flowing as they walk, swing by joyously; then comes, painfully hobbling beneath a heavy burden of yellow gourds, a barefooted old woman, and anon a man riding à la gineta, a pacing nag with brass-embossed harness, and great box stirrups. Then silence again for another half-hour, and this is life at Ourem.
Still through a land of pine and heather with beautiful little valleys full of vines, figs, and olives, we drove for two hours more, and, just as the black shadows began to lengthen, we drove into the town of Leiria, the Calippo of the Romans, and for long the stronghold whence the Moors harried the advancing Christians to the north. It is a lovely place on the banks of the Liz, set in the midst of pine-clad hills, and the centre of a great agricultural district. Here, again, the two abrupt eminences that loom over the town are crowned respectively by the enormous mediæval stronghold and the religious house that for ever seems to keep it company—the sword and the cross, twin instruments of soldier and priest, to keep the people in subjection, both alike happily now superseded, in Portugal at least, by more enlightened means.
Parabéns caro João pela iniciativa. Abraço
ResponderEliminarAdorei esta tomar tão pitoresca ,estão lindas as pinturas
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