Medieval cemetery of Sangüesa: the last frontier

The journey, its mysteries, its teachings and its metaphors, circumstances and complementarities, which, in some way, define that subjective concept that we call existence.

From the Greek poet Homer to the psychology of Joseph Campbell, the journey motivates, defines, writes and erases the lines of our life, whether these are crooked or not, turning us, without us often being aware of it, into heroes and villains of our own existence.

The adventure never stops and as we commit ourselves to it, we also find signs that warn us that our steps are nothing but slight footprints that mean little or nothing when it comes to undertaking the most transcendental of all journeys: that of death.

It is difficult, then, for all these considerations, for all these apprehensions not to assault the fragile borders of our limited system of values, when, standing, as in this case, in front of that universe of existential archetypes that the medieval stonemasons carved with praiseworthy patience in the ashlars of that metaphorical spiritual customs house, which is the church of Santa María la Real, located in the leading town of the Saint James Way, which is Sangüesa, they are not the ideal complement to visit one of the few medieval cemeteries, which, although they do not tell us where we come from, at least they warn us where we are going.

Indeed, adjacent to the walls of the sacred enclosure, as was customary, these simple tombs made of slabs, in most cases and with a simple funeral stele as payment for the vanity of memory, warn us, as a timely warning to sailors, that, like those anonymous countrymen who preceded us, the ship that will not return awaits us all, as a poet once said.

We also see from the dimensions of some of them that age does not matter and that death, in the end, makes us all equal: whether we are infants, master stonemasons, as can be seen in the symbols of the square, the chisel and the pliers engraved on the back of a stele, knights related to the cross pattée, simple farmers who one day watered with their tears the same land that later welcomed them or unfortunate pilgrims who, dreaming of reaching the tomb of the Apostle in Santiago de Compostela, ended here the exhausting days of their transcendental journey.

And as a well-known mourning song says, death may not be the end.

NOTICE: Both the text and the accompanying photographs are my exclusive intellectual property and therefore are subject to my Copyright.

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