Meanwhile, in Spain…Pageantry!

Tolomato Cemetery was open to the public as usual on the Third Saturday of the month, this year on April 19.  But that week was also Holy Week, the week leading up to Easter during which the events in the life and death of Christ are remembered, and I was in Madrid, Spain, watching the processions that reenact or commemorate some of these events.  And as always, I thought of St Augustine and wondered what we did back in the days when we were a Spanish colony and had the customs and practices of any Spanish colony.  Spanish customs are very formal.  Here we see a procession of Royal Halberdiers, who guard the Royal Palace, accompanying a Good Friday Procession.

The 16th and 17th centuries are considered the Golden Age of Spanish sculpture, and many of the figures carried on the processional platforms (called “pasos”) date to this period.  They are very beautiful figures, carved of wood that was then finished with gesso (a fine layer of a plaster-like substance to give a smooth finish) and carefully painted. Some processional figures are known as “figuras de vestir,” meaning they were meant for dressing. In those cases, only the hands, feet and heads were carved, and the rest of the body was basically a wooden and wire armature that could be dressed in lavish robes and then posed on the paso.  But many of them were full carvings, such as this beautiful “Cristo Yacente,” Christ Lying Prone, which was brought out on Holy Saturday in Madrid.  This is a mid-20th century figure from Olot, a town north of Barcelona famed for its religious statuary.

Did we have these in St Augustine?  We certainly had our version of them, probably not as sumptuous, but we know from an inventory done in Cuba at the end of the First Spanish Period, when all the church goods were brought from St Augustine to Havana before the arrival of the British in Florida, that we had numerous statues and small pasos, meant to be carried by 2-4 people. The one you see above is being carried on the shoulders of about 14 people; in the photo, it’s actually resting on posts while they wait to move on to the next street.  Big processional floats such as the one below can weigh from one to three tons, and are carried by 30-40 people, but there is no indication that St Augustine ever had anything this large. 

However, mentioned in the Havana inventory is a figure with moveable arms and an “urna de cristal.”   Often a crucifix would have a figure of Christ where the arms were attached with leather straps so that the figure could be taken down for Good Friday and the arms moved to lie at the sides.  The figure was then often displayed in a glass casket, or “urna de cristal.”   Details are a little lacking in the inventory, so we don’t know the size of the figure, but in the colonies, I have observed that they are often about 3/4 size.  Mexico produced a lot of beautiful and elegant religious statuary so ours may have come from Mexico; on the other hand, we were under the bishops of Cuba, and the Cubans generally seem to have ordered their religious goods from Spain.

At that time, at the end of the First Spanish Period, the parish church was Nuestra Señora de la Soledad, Our Lady of Solitude or Loneliness, which is an image of the Virgin Mary after the death of Christ.  We certainly would have had a figure representing her, although probably not as magnificent as the 18th century figure you see below, being carried through the streets of Madrid by some 30 people, accompanied by penitentes (hooded penitents), drummers and a large band.

During the Second Spanish Period, when Tolomato Cemetery was active, about a third of the town’s religious goods were sent back to St Augustine from Havana.  Another 3000 pesos worth were ordered by the Bishop of Havana from Barcelona, but the ship was captured by pirates just as it was arriving and taken to Charleston.  It’s unclear whether the Spanish were able to ransom the goods back or get them back in some other way, and whether any of the goods made it to St Augustine. In any case, anything from that period would have been destroyed in the 1887 fire that destroyed the interior of the Cathedral.

And the Varela Chapel at Tolomato, built in 1853, was always simple. As seen in the above 19th century photo, it is described by the Cubans who arranged for its building as having a carved mahogany altar – the elaborately carved parts of the current altar are from that original altar – an ebony cross with silver tips, mahogany candlesticks, a carpet on the floor and a painting of the Transfiguration behind the altar. Everything except the aforementioned carved parts of the altar has disappeared over the years.  But we know that in 1801, when General Jorge (Georges) Biassou was buried, he had clergy in vestments, soldiers marching, and horses with plumes bearing him to Tolomato Cemetery…so perhaps we can assume that St Augustine once upon a time had its modest version of what we see below in the streets of Madrid.

The Demise of the Gravestone

Walking through old St Mary's Cemetery in Charleston, SC, I was touched by all the stories told by the gravestones. Burials started there sometime in the late 18^th century; the current church was built in 1836, but that was after the first one burned. It in turn had replaced a “wooden shack” located on the site that was used as a church by the small and somewhat ostracized Catholic population of 18^th century Charleston.    But the old headstones remained - in English, French, Italian, German and Latin, to enumerate those that I saw – and gave me an interesting glimpse into early Charleston life.  The majority of the gravestones were those of Irish or French inhabitants, the two main Catholic groups in early Charleston, but there were several that showed birthplaces in different parts of Italy, one from Switzerland, some from Austria, and one man from Transylvania, a state that doesn't even exist anymore. (Back in the days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it was located in a part of what is now Romania.) There were place names of all kinds, names of distant places that have been swallowed up by time, by wars, or simply by changing tastes.    The Transylvanian traveler’s stone was in Latin, and told a rather long story: His name was Matheus Leopoldus Stupich (aka Mattias Leopold Stupicz), and he was a medical doctor and botanist. It tells you that he was a Roman Catholic from Transylvania, although he is described by some historians as German and by others as Hungarian. The stone informs you in large letters that he had been sent to America by the IMPERATOR JOSEPHO SECUNDUM, referring to the Emperor Joseph II of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And indeed it was Joseph II who sent Stupich, along with four other men who were gardeners, artists or botanists, "IN AMERICUM" in 1783 to collect plant samples with the mission of finding new, hardy American plants to replace plants from the Imperial Gardens that had been killed by a severe freeze that winter. The five men set out together but before long, the artist, Bernhard Albrecht Moll, split off from the group and ended up in Charleston.     Moll, who was from a noble family and readily accepted by snobbish Charlestonians, supported himself by teaching art and doing the cut-out paper silhouettes popular in the late 18^th-early 19^th centuries, and was soon joined by Stupich and one of the gardeners, Franz Boos.  Their story is told on the Clemson University website, where Stupich was named the "South Carolina German American of the Month."  Above is Moll’s silhouette of Boos, which also appears on the website. They collected plant and animal specimens in the Charleston area and shipped them back to Austria, and also kept travel journals and wrote an interesting account of the Goose Creek area near Charleston.  Stupich also decided to remain in Charleston and resume his work as a doctor; he lived and prospered the rest of his life there, much to the annoyance of the Emperor. He died there at the age of 62 and his stone is one of the oldest in St Mary's Cemetery.    And then of course there are the graves of children and the graves of people who died "of a fever," since Charleston was subject to frequent outbreaks of mosquito borne yellow fever, just like St Augustine. There were also the graves of clergy ordained in a variety of European countries and the early US. Of course, many clergy are buried under the floor of the church itself, and the lovely painting in the dome was donated in memory of one of them, the Rev. Dr. Corcoran, by his students at the seminary in Philadelphia.    When I looked at these stones, I thought that people of our generation will never be known this way. Since modern people are either cremated and scattered or buried under small neutral "name and date only" plaques in giant lawns designed to be easily trimmed by riding mowers, we'll never know where  they were born or anything about the circumstances of their lives, such as that of the young man who lies under the stone below: born in Tarbes, France to die in Charleston in 1819 as a victim of the “prevailing fever,” he was “sincerely lamented by all who knew him.”     This to me is a real loss. Perhaps we don't need to have the giant self-aggrandizing 19^th century monument gone mad, but it is sad to slip into anonymity and uniformity, wiping out these unique little footpaths of history that we see here in a historic cemetery such as old St Mary's or Tolomato. The custom of detailed, individualized grave markers has come and gone throughout history. At Tolomato, for example, we have fewer gravestones than many cemeteries of the same size because the early custom was simply to put a small wooden or metal cross above the grave. Spanish grave markers for the average person at that time tended to be simple, at least in part because burials were often somewhat temporary and remains would be removed to an ossuary or another place after a certain time. In addition, until the mid-19^th century, the economic situation of St Augustine was a little more fragile than that of Charleston (see the mid-late 19th century photo below). Yet we see throughout human history the desire to commemorate the deceased and preserve a few facts about his or her life so that passing strangers years later may see them and think about that life.   An examination of the gravestones at Tolomato will also tell us these stories. Think of the story of our earliest marked burial, that of Elizabeth Forrester who died at the age of 16 in 1798, or of the sad Benet-Baya monument, commemorating the loss of an entire family. Or the happier stone of Fr. Miguel O’Reilly (d. 1812), which tells of his Irish birth, Spanish education, and New World labors.  
Perhaps gravestones will someday come back into style. By coincidence, one of our board members, Janet Jordan, was surfing her way around and came across a group called the Association for Gravestone Studies. If you’re interested in gravestones, take a look at their page! But I noticed that the topic of one of their recent meetings was this very issue: will there be no gravestones to tell these stories in the future?

Yet Another Tolomato Connection Found.

Just in time for the St Patrick’s season, we have an interesting glimpse of the Irish life of Fr. Felix Varela, for whom the Varela Chapel at Tolomato was built. He was St. Augustine's Cuban-born local son, a brilliant philosopher and scholar who grew up here speaking Spanish and English, was ordained in Cuba and expected to spend his life in Cuba or Spain. But by those mysterious crooked lines of God, he spent his priestly career working among impoverished Irish immigrants in New York from the 1820s to 1850. He even learned Gaelic to work with them, and his church in New York, St James parish, was the founding place of the Ancient Order of Hibernians in 1833.

The photo above shows you the St James Church school...and the street sign commemorating the Ancient Order of Hibernians, originally a protective group founded in response to mob attacks on Catholics and the burning of old St Mary's church in 1831.  Below, we see the church, with the kids from the school across the street having recess in front of it.

St James Church is temporarily closed because of water damage that occurred during New York's harsh winter this year, but on a recent trip to NYC, I was fortunate enough to meet a parishioner and the parish priest, who invited me to view the building. But that will be the subject of another post.

In the meantime, I found another great connection. The cemetery above is all that remains of the old Shearith Israel Spanish and Portuguese Jewish Cemetery. It was opened in 1683, succeeding an earlier Jewish cemetery whose location has been lost. At that time it was outside the walls of the original Dutch city at the lower tip of Manhattan. It continued to receive burials until 1833. The cemetery is located about two or three 19^th/20^th century tenement buildings behind St James Church. Bernard Baruch, the famous NYC financier and philanthropist, paid for its restoration in the 1960s, and you can read more about it if you click right here.

Around the corner, Fr. Varela founded St. James Church in 1827, originally calling it the “Church of the Immigrants.” But the name was changed to St James by 1836, the year in which he built the current building. St James, aka Santiago, is the patron saint of Spain, and this may have influenced the name change. In any case, enough money was raised to build a large church - on the foundation of an old brewery - that was possibly designed by Minard Lafever, an important early master builder/architect. The area includes the cemetery and the church and a tiny park known as St James Triangle. When you look at the photo of St James Church above, notice the similarity to the façade of the Varela Chapel at Tolomato.  This was probably in the mind of the Cubans who commissioned the Varela Chapel in Tolomato Cemetery.

A Great Day for Great People!

Here are our Tolomato Docents posing after a record day. We had 611 visitors today!  The TCPA crew was exhausted by the time 3:00 pm rolled around, but really happy to have had so many wonderful, interested visitors. 

Here we see (l-r) great tour leader Brooke Radaker, warm greeter Priscilla de la Cruz, fearless leader Patty Kelbert, happy chapel harpist Mary Jane Ballou, the dynamic Ray Hinkley (with the fingers) and the scholarly and ever-informative Matt Armstrong.  Lin Masley and Norm Merski were also there most of the day to lend a hand but didn’t make it for the photo-op, so you’ll just have to imagine them.

A wonderful, wonderful day!

Meanwhile, from Mexico…

While Tolomato Cemetery had served as an Indian mission in St. Augustine’s First Spanish Period (1565-1763), and probably did have burials in or around the chapel that was located there, no visible evidence of these burials remains.

We don’t have anything like this, for example…

Or even this…the text of which starts “Under this stone…”

These were in, respectively, the cemetery and the churchyard of the parish church of Santiago Tejupan in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, where I recently spent a few days touring various historic (and often remote) churches in the area.

This beautiful church was built by Dominican missionaries in the 16th century, and is still in use as the parish church of this small town.  Burials used to be in the churchyard directly in front of the church, but in the 1850s, when Mexico underwent a period of great and sometimes disruptive change known as the Reform, the order went out from Mexico City that cemeteries could no longer be under the control of churches but had to be located elsewhere. In this case, the parishioners just moved it to the outside of the old fence of the churchyard, so it’s still accessible from the church.  However, the old burials were left in place.  And they are very old indeed.

Above you see the happy visitors (mostly organists touring the historic organs still contained in these churches) taking photos – from the midst of the old churchyard cemetery.

The Varela Chapel Amid Stormy Seas

 

Our humble, peaceful Varela Chapel was shown in a different light in 1853, the year of the death of Fr. Varela.

We have been doing research on the chapel and its building, and came across a pamphlet published for the dedication of the cornerstone on March 22, 1853, less than a month after the death of Fr. Varela (February 25, 1853). The money for the building of the chapel had originally been collected by his Cuban friends to get medical treatment and more comfort for him while he was living in the little wooden room behind the schoolhouse next to the current Cathedral. But when they arrived with the money, they found that he had died only a few days earlier.

So they immediately decided to build a mausoleum and funeral chapel, since Fr. Varela himself had often regretted the fact that the cemetery had no chapel at that time and had unsuccessfully urged that one be built.  The chapel was speedily designed by a local builder, in consultation with the Cubans, making a conscious effort to keep it simple and unpretentious and in keeping with Fr. Varela’s life.  His friends felt they were fulfilling a wish of his, as well as providing a dignified final resting place for him.

The dedication was conducted by the parish priest, the French Fr. Edmond Aubril, and attended by a priest representing the Archdiocese of New York and a priest representing the Diocese of Savannah, since Fr. Varela had spent nearly 30 years working in New York City and was the Vicar General of New York, while St Augustine at that time was not a diocese but was under the Diocese of Savannah.  It was also attended by the church wardens, the children from the parish school, and large number of local citizens. A contemporary account states that “the deep feeling which pervaded the spectators might have been observed from the tears and sobs of the many who knew so well, and love so tenderly, the good Father Varela.”

The addresses and homilies that were delivered – in Spanish and English - at the dedication were sealed into a metal box and placed in the cornerstone, where we may assume that they remain to this very day.

The Ermita of Tolomato

The 18th century maps we call upon for much of our knowledge of the layout of St Augustine, including the location of the “Pueblo de Indios de Tolomato,” the Indian Village at Tolomato, often label the building there as an “ermita.”  In fact, the word “ermita” turns up all over our early maps.  Below is the description from the 1763 de la Puente Map of the “Ermita de Piedra” at Tolomato. It is often translated “hermitage,” but was it?  Were there really hermits scattered all over early St Augustine?

Highly unlikely, since the word “ermita” had by then come to mean simply a chapel usually located in some place outside of town to make religious services more available to the population that lived around there, or occasionally to house a shrine and be the focus for particular devotions.   Usually an ermita did not have a resident priest, and was often served not by the priest of the nearest parish, but by a member of a nearby religious order.   In the case of the ermitas in St Augustine, this would have meant a Franciscan from the Convento de San Francisco, now the St. Francis Barracks. 

Above we see the depiction of the ermita at Tolomato on the 1763 map.  The chapels that were built for the Indian towns or missions were often referred to as “ermitas” on the maps, although an “ermita” back in the Old World generally did not provide full parochial services (such as baptisms, funeral masses,  etc.). However, we can assume that the mission chapels did so. Tolomato had a doctrinario, that is, a friar who was the regular spiritual shepherd of the little group of mostly Guale Indians, and thus Tolomato must have been considered a doctrina, or a settled Christian Indian village with regular instruction, prayers, and religious activities.  A doctrina often had a resident priest, although in the case of Tolomato, since the Convento was so close, we don’t know whether the friars actually lived in the village or not.

But what was the origin of the “ermita” as a concept?  A couple of years ago, spending time in La Rioja, the winegrowing region of Northern Spain, I saw this in action.  In the photo below is a bluff filled with caves, which were very probably what the first ermitas looked like. Except that there would have been a genuine hermit living there, descending from his cave only occasionally to get water or food and once in a while, to attend prayers with the other hermits who had settled in the area.

Monasticism came to Spain very early, from the deserts of Egypt, and early monasticism was “eremitical,” that is, based on a collection of hermits living in some proximity but not really having a community life.  The word “eremitical” comes from the Greek word erēmia, “desert,”  and the English words “hermit” and “hermitage” refer to this tradition of living alone in the desert.  Below we see the cave of San Millán, a 6th century hermit in La Rioja.

 

But as time went by, the hermits began to develop a more regular community life and community prayer.  Rules were written to govern their lives together, with one of the very first ones being the Rule of St Augustine, written by St Augustine in the 5th century.  As more hermits accepted the rule, they built permanent structures, such as the building we see below, San Millán de Suso (the “upper” San Millan), built high on the mountain next to the hermit’s then abandoned cave.

Eventually, they built huge monasteries to accommodate hundreds of monks for a cycle of regular prayers, chant and study.  Below is San Millán de Yuso, the “lower” San Millán , built down in the valley when the group of hermits turned into a “cenobitical” community, a term coming from the Greek words meaning “common life.”

 

And of course, towns grew around the monasteries.  This photo shows us the town cemetery.

So we can see that the ermitas of San Agustin were far removed from the origins of the term.  And now we generally translate the word as chapel or even church, which was how the structures at the mission village sites were described by the English when they in turn began to make their maps of Florida after their installation in 1764.