A visit to the medieval cemetery of Javier

Like Sangüesa, the neighbouring town of Javier also has its own small medieval cemetery, which often goes completely unnoticed by the many visitors who visit the place, especially outside the city walls, at that nerve centre of devotion and also of pilgrimage, which is its castle and the added basilica.

This small Navarrese town, which also follows the trail that the generous waters of the Aragón River leave behind on its tortuous path until it flows into that other metaphorical sea, which is the Ebro River, owes its name to the birthplace of Saint Francis Xavier, the favourite and enlightened son, who took preaching to places as exotic as Japan.

Next to the small chapel that the parents of San Francisco Javier raised in honour of the Virgin of Javier, whose small and enthroned statue presides over the place of honour of the Main Altarpiece, we find ourselves again with another small memory in honour of some fallen ones whose names we will never know and who, like the medieval stonemasons who were displaying their Art and their Knowledge throughout the length and breadth of the Way of the Stars, remain forever in the most complete anonymity.

From the unctuous Roman tombstones, among whose funerary motifs the six-petalled flowers stand out and in which, generally, the name of the deceased appeared together with a dedication to the gods, in the medieval funerary steles, perhaps a derivative of those others that marked the Celtiberian cemeteries, the name, together with the body that had carried it in life, mysteriously returned to the dust of the earth and consequently, also to oblivion.

Instead, a variety of symbols, in some cases inevitably licked by erosion, respectfully guarded the remains: crosses of different shapes but identical symbolism in the background, alternating with solar, geometric motifs and even five-pointed stars, also called ‘druid’s foot’, in an enigmatic symphony of Symbolism, which, in some way, made good the famous Latin phrase ‘sic transit gloria mundi’ or ‘thus passes the glory of the world’, predicting an eternal life in the Hereafter, which, perhaps, as the Spiritists tried to demonstrate centuries later, with the Fox Sisters and Allan Kardec at the head, was not so different from this other ‘Here’.

NOTICE: Both the text and the photographs that accompany it, as well as the video that illustrates it, are my exclusive intellectual property and therefore, are subject to my Copyright.

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