AMONGST some photographs that were offered me for sale on the day after my arrival in Santiago I noticed one, the interior of a church, of which the perspective seemed to be quite wrong. “The man who took this one cannot be a good photographer,” I remarked. “No photographer who understood his business could take such a picture as that.”

“Excuse me,” replied the salesman, smiling. “It is the fault of the building, or rather, it is the peculiarity of the architecture; the photographer did his work right enough.” Then, seeing my astonishment, he added, “I see you are quite a stranger here. You have not even heard of our Santa Maria la Real de Sar, which is one of the wonders of Galicia, nay, of the whole world. It is like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, only much more remarkable. It was built crooked on purpose, and the greatest architects in Spain are unable to explain how it was done. It is the only example of its kind in the history of architecture.”

“I must go and see it,” I replied, greatly puzzled. “Is it far from the cathedral?”

“Oh yes; it’s down in the valley to the south-east of the town,” replied my informant. “You know Santiago is on a hill. It’s a steep road down—too steep for a carriage—so you will have to go on foot.”

Not many days after the above conversation I found myself, one sunny afternoon, the 23rd of January, descending the hill in question with a young Spanish boy as my guide, the son of my hostess, who, with all the other school children of Spain, had been given a holiday in honour of King Alfonso’s birthday.

On the outskirts of the town we passed, on the left, the entrance to an immense barrack-like convent for women, all of granite, and saw another no less sombre and of equally imposing dimensions at a little distance and quite outside the town.

The narrow street by which we descended was abominably paved, and my ankles were twisted unmercifully. The houses on either side grew poorer and more dilapidated at every step; they were mostly whitewashed, with rotten doors, which were cut in half, so that the lower half could be kept shut,—a precaution against the toddling children, long-legged pigs, and poultry which swarmed in every direction. We passed an old woman seated in the midst of a crowd of hens who were pecking corn from her outstretched hand. Out of the next house ran a pig followed by a tiny girl of about six, with a stick in her hand to fetch it back. A woman now met us with a couple of great hams balanced on her head, one on top of the other; and a little farther on we passed a young mother teaching her baby girl, who could only just walk, to carry a little bundle on her head. The child screamed every time it felt the weight upon its little cranium, but its mother persisted with the lesson.

At the foot of the hill an old bridge crossed the river Sar, and a little below it women were busy washing their linen in the clear stream. I stopped to photograph them as I passed. On the other side of the valley the sloping fields were green as in summer.

At last we found ourselves approaching the famous Colegiata de Sar, a little old church in a green field formed by a bend in the river. The church itself was surrounded by modern buildings, and looked remarkably insignificant in consideration of the fact that it had recently been proclaimed a “National Monument.” Its outer walls were almost hidden by elliptical arches or arched buttresses, but its fine Romanesque apse was still unenclosed, though the windows had been blocked up. To enter the lateral door on the north side we had to pass through the parish cemetery.

The church of Santa Maria de Sar is rectangular in form and the walls and windows are Romanesque, while most of the present vaulting, added in the fifteenth century, is Gothic. There are eight square piers, four on either side of the central nave, each ornamented with elegant Byzantine shafts, supporting the toral arches which divide the church into three vaulted naves; at the end of each nave is an apse. “As we enter the church, our first impulse,” says Sanchez, “is to

draw back precipitately. The pillars appear to be bulging, the arches are about to crash to the ground, the beautiful columns are reeling upon their bases, the walls are tottering and about to crumble, and the roof is just going to fall with a crash. Is it an earthquake, or are we seized by sudden giddiness?” Neither the one nor the other; the whole thing is an illusion—a complete illusion. And when the traveller has overcome his first surprise, he is struck with wonder at this marvellous feat of architecture, and his thoughts are carried to Pisa or to Bologna.

“But are you sure that these slanting walls and their sloping columns have always been awry like this?” we ask.

“Yes,” reply the archÆologists and the architects who have visited Sar during the nineteenth century, including such authorities as Lopez Ferreiro and Fernandez Sanchez. “For seven and a half centuries this building has stood thus. Thirty generations of men have come to gaze at it, and we still marvel at the temerity of the man who designed it. If,” they say, “this had all been the effect of sinking ground and not the result of calculation, how could the church have remained thus intact? Would it not in that case have fallen in ruins long ago?”

The arches outside prove nothing, for they do not date farther back than the middle of the seventeenth century. If this leaning had been the result of sinking foundations, the vaulting would have cracked, and the pillars would have been broken to pieces. But the present Gothic vaulting is not so old as the walls; it was added in 1485-1504, when Gomez Gonzalez was its prior, as the inscription and coat of arms near the keystone of the arch next to the Capilla Mayor testify. Is it likely that any architect would have added such vaulting had the walls really been falling? Besides, in none of the manuscripts preserved for so many centuries in the archives of the Colegiata is there any mention of this extraordinary inclination nor of any catastrophe connected with it. This silence favours the belief that the whole thing is intentional, and a feat of architectural skill. Then, too, if the sinking had been accidental, the inclination of the walls and pillars would have been inwards, not, as is the case, outwards. So much for the accepted theory.

The word “bandy-legged” is not, admittedly, an architectural term, yet it is the most appropriate epithet I can find to bring before my readers the peculiar inward inclination of the piers and walls of this church. The man who fetched the keys and showed me round may have been an ignorant fellow, but he at least saw no mystery about the structure of his parish church: he pointed out to me that the river Sar not only ran very close to the edifice, but filtered into the ground beneath it. The wooden floor which I beheld was six feet higher than the original floor; it had been raised on account of the water, and completely hid the bases of the piers. Had the whole depth of the pillars been visible, their inclination, or, rather, the bow in their legs, would have been much more striking even than it is at present. “The foundations could be drained,” said the man, “but it would cost lots of money”; and so saying, he opened a trap door in the central nave and let me look down. It was like the dungeon floor in the Doge’s Palace at Venice. “You see, with all that water, it’s quite natural that the building should get shunted a bit,” he continued.

I discussed all this on my return with one of the local archÆologists of a younger generation than those I have quoted. “I have seen,” said he, “documents preserved in the archives of the Colegiata which speak of the falling-in of the original roof, and of its being replaced by the present one. For eight years I too believed this church to be an architectural marvel. I imbibed with enthusiasm all the odd ideas about it, but after a time my enthusiasm began to cool and my certainty to waver, and then, after a long and gradual process, my mind became free of all belief about the matter, and was at last able to think for itself. I thought, and thought, and thought, till at length I determined to go and make a fresh and careful examination of the whole church stone for stone, and I reasoned thus: ‘If it was originally intended that the walls and pillars should slant as they do now, surely the blocks of stone would have been made to slant too; but if, on the contrary, it was intended to stand straight in the ordinary way, the blocks of stone would not have been made to slant.’ I then examined the stones, and finding that there was not the least suspicion of a slant in any of them, came to the conclusion that the inclination of the church must have taken place since its construction, and must be due to natural causes. Then, too, the fact that the original roof fell in, indicated some bulging; and I finally came to the conclusion arrived at by your guide, that the water underneath might account for a great deal.”

Every architect who visits Santiago, every engineer hurries out to see the Colegiata de Sar, thinking that he perhaps might be able to solve the mystery. Foreign admirals, when they bring their fleets to the neighbouring harbour of Villagarcia, hasten to pay a visit to Sar, not because they have a predilection for old churches, but because they have heard tell of its extraordinary architectural peculiarity.

This Colegiata was founded by MuÑio, Bishop of MondoÑedo, one of the authors of the Historia Compostelana, who in his old age wished to retire with a few aged companions (canons of the cathedral) to some peaceful spot where he might end his days in prayer and meditation. He built a church and hermitages for himself and his companions, and lived there quietly for some years; then, when he felt death approaching, he handed the whole property over to Archbishop Gelmirez, that it might be made into an Augustine monastery. The whole story may be read in the ancient documents still preserved. The letter signed by Diego Gelmirez on September 1, Era 1174 (1137), and confirmed by Alfonso VII., is one of the most interesting of the diplomatic documents contained in the rich archives of the monastery. When in 1235, a century later, Archbishop Bernard renounced his mitre, he retired to end his days in the monastery of Sar, where his roughly hewn sarcophagus and his recumbent stone statue are still to be seen; the traveller will find it by the wall between the right apse and the door of the sacristy. The statue has a long beard,[176] which is rather unusual, a mitre, a long staff decorated with scallop-shells, with a tau handle. In 1711 this sarcophagus was opened by order of Archbishop Monroy, and the body was found well preserved and the garment on it in good condition, according to Zepedano, whom Villa-Amil quotes as a reliable authority. On the outer side of the sarcophagus are carved the following leonine verses, in two lines, one above the other:—

Bernard died on November 20, 1240, as we learn from an inscription in five lines on the head of the sarcophagus (the date of the era is given). Such was the odour of sanctity in which he died that when the sarcophagus was opened several of his teeth were extracted as relics, also part of his staff and some fragments of his dress. Villa-Amil has carefully examined these last and compared them with others of the same epoch preserved in the Cluny Museum. He concludes that the material of one of St. Bernard’s garments was Moorish in design and texture.

At the other end of the church is another granite tomb, that of Don Gomez Gonzalez, the prior in whose day the greater part of the present vaulting was added. The body of his successor and cousin, Jacome Alvarez, lies between two of the columns that support the eastern vaults, in a sarcophagus which Alvarez had prepared for himself during his lifetime and mentioned in his will. Sanchez gives the whole clause in his description of the Colegiata. There are also many interesting inscriptions on the old pavement stones of the aisles, now mostly covered with water.

Part of the original cloister of the monastery is still standing, the northern front. Nine delicate and richly sculptured Romanesque arches and two keystones of the vaulting are still in their place; they rest upon piers ornamented with pairs of slender columns whose capitals are decorated with sculptured foliage, very full and natural, and every one different. The bases of the columns rest upon plinths. This remnant of the cloister is considered to be one of the most perfect bits of mediÆval architecture in Galicia. The rest of it is modern, and dates from about the end of the eighteenth century. In the north-east angle is a fine granite sarcophagus of another prior, whose recumbent statue in full sacerdotal robes has both hands holding a book upon his breast; it dates from the year 1368.

The monastery, which was entirely rebuilt in the eighteenth century, is now the home of the parish priest, as the church is now the parish church of Sar. The Churrigueresque belfry was put up when the original faÇade of the church was spoiled by the addition of the elliptical arches. My guide pointed out to me two slender columns, evidently part of the old cloister, which are now placed on either side of the rectory door. He also showed me, in the church, an old wooden bench, eaten with age, with the Arms of the Inquisition stamped upon it, a cross with a palm leaf on its right and a sword on its left.

A hospital, chiefly for canons afflicted with elephantiasis, Hospital de San Lazaro, was founded in connection with this monastery in 1149, and had dwelling-houses attached to it, sustentari possint elefantiosi canonici.[178] The prior of Sar was expected to take the inmates of this hospital under his spiritual care. There is in Santiago to this day a special hospital for that class of disease, and it attracts patients from all parts of the province. I have heard it remarked that on this account visitors should be careful in their selection of inns and boarding-houses.