Monks gotta eat as well as pray. I don't think I've ever seen a bigger kitchen. Here's the tiled vent above the open hearth oven. There's also a stone tub where water (and fish!) were once piped in directly from the Alcoa River. A guidebook cited the gluttony of the monks as a factor in Portugal's nineteenth century banishment of its religious orders.
Chris is impersonating one of the hundreds, maybe even thousands of monks who illuminated manuscripts in this scriptorium. In fact, an early history of Portugal was among many books produced by the Cistercian order. Those that weren't destroyed by the Napoleonic Army in 1810 or stolen by thieves 30 years later during anti-clerical riots, ended up in Portugal's national library in Lisbon.
I began to realize that when judging monasteries, it's all about the interior courtyard. This one is known as the Cloister of Silence.
The church's towers were added five centuries after the monastery opened, during the Baroque period. It's hard to imagine how many white-robed monks meditated here over time.
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A pair of tombs in the church tell a gruesome love story. When Pedro I entered into a second marriage arranged by his father King Alfonso IV to strengthen a political alliance, he fell in love with his wife's lady-in-wating, Inês de Castro, an aristocrat from Galicia. Alfonso didn't trust Inês and had her decapitated in front of her young children, his own grandchildren!
When Pedro I assumed the throne, he claimed he and Inês had secretly married prior to her assassination, declaring her his posthumous queen, which was hotly contested by some members of the royal family who didn't want to see her traumatized, illegitimate children take away their claims to the throne. According to some accounts, Pedro had her body exhumed and insisted that all members of the court swear their allegiance by kissing her decomposing hand. Is it any wonder that their story has been immortalized in Portuguese literature and music? Of course that didn't stop the French from breaking off Inês's nose during the Peninsular War when they ransacked the monastery and church.
Pedro rests on the other side of the church, shaped like a cross. The intricate carvings on the lovers' tombs--these depict the life of Saint Bartholomew--are among the finest examples of Gothic art in Portugal.
Of course time moves on. This drinking fountain can't be anything other than Baroque.
However, the central nave of the church remains utterly unadorned, just as it was when first built.
Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century rulers of Portugal loom over the Room of Kings near the church entrance where azulejo tiles also depict the history of the monastery,
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