The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

patiently waiting their turn outside the confessionals. Here and there devout worshippers, lost to the world, kneeling apart with hands outstretched like a cross. Everywhere priests, canons, monks and nuns from all the surrounding country gather here as it is the eve of the feast of the Apostle. As we advanced slowly towards the high altar we found crowds waiting for confession outside the confessional Pro Unguis Germanica et Hungarica, a reminder of how international a place Santiago has always been. Near the confessional lies the tomb of the Archbishop of Cashel in Ireland, Dr. Thomas Valois, who died May 6, 1654.
    When we descended the narrow steps to the crypt beneath the high altar, I felt a sense of disillusion as I recalled the description given by Aymery Picaud of the fairylike subterranean church, ablaze with lights and flashing jewels and fragrant with oriental perfumes. But Ambrosio Morales in Inis Viaje Santo in 1572 writes that it was Archbishop Gelmirez himself who closed up the entrance to the crypt where the Apostle lay, that none might penetrate, and closed it remained when Drake came to La Coruña, for when the Archbishop of that time, San Clemente, began to open up the tomb in order to remove the relics, he had to give up the attempt, for there came out of the tomb a great wind and a great light, and the Archbishop then said, “Let us leave the Apostle; he will take care of himself and take care of us.” As Miss King shows, Compostella, like Santa Sophia at Constantinople and the church of St. Francis at Assisi, must have had three churches one above the other, and the Holy of Holies deep underground with its blazing lights, fragrant perfumes and its mystical silence was modelled originally on the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem. Above the crypt rises the great Capilla Mayor, so hidden by its wealth of seventeenth-century Baroque ornamentation and Salomonic columns that we can hardly discern the Romanesque structure beneath. The altar is of silver and above in its camarín, under a lofty baldachin, is the painted granite statue, periodically repainted, of St. James, belonging to the school of Master Matthew in the thirteenth century, which resembles that of his mother, Mary Salomé, nearby. Owing to its gilded beard, the image is affectionately called by the people ‘The Saint with the golden beard’.
    At the back of the altar we followed the other pilgrims who ascended the steps to the camarín, in order to carry out the mediaeval rite of embracing the Apostolic image. Behind the statue hanging from the roof is the lamp given by the Great Captain on the occasion of his visit to the Apostle’s tomb in 1512. Even the candles that are kept continuously lighted around the altar have historic significance, for they recall the Battle of Salado in 1340, when Alfonso XI invoked the protection of the Saint and made a donation to the cost of keeping them alight in perpetuity.

THE DAY OF SANTIAGO

    Thirty years ago when I made my first pilgrimage to Santiago, the festival on July 25 was a more intimate affair than today because it was confined chiefly to inhabitants of Galicia and North Spain. It was more colourful, too, because the Galician majority dressed in their bright costumes and there was little of the drabness of the modern international crowd of pilgrims. Early in the morning, the crowds gathered in the great Plaza del Hospital, the balconies of which were hung with red and yellow. The city resounded with the booming of church bells, the crackling of countless whizz-bangs, the firing of salutes. From the crowded plaza we could see through the wide open doors of the Obradoiro façade the ethereal splendours of the Portico of Glory which seemed to belong to another world. I remember the Feast of Santiago in those days as one of song, for the streets and the great plaza were thronged with choirs which entered the great basilica singing.
    In 1954, the Marían and Jubilee Year, the Feast of the Apostle drew so huge a crowd of Spanish and foreign visitors that it recalled the great pilgrimages of the Middle Ages when Compostella became for a few days the centre of the Christian world. It was fascinating to stand at the Puerta Francigena near the Church of Santo Domingo and watch the hordes of pilgrims arriving by road in huge buses, touring cars, all shapes and sizes from the princely Rolls Royces and Packards sailing past the ramshackle bone-shakers that chugged their way noisily along the road.
    At