Towns of Soria, Spain: Viana de Duero

"And the name," I ask myself, "will it not be a distorted reference to the ancient goddess Diana?"

Even today, after a month of my visit to Viana de Duero, I still continue to wonder if the reflection of my friend, Magister Alkaest, obeys an ancestral reality, perhaps in line with that magical story inherited by Gárgoris and Habidis, so eloquently described by Sánchez Dragó. In fact, it may be a Diana that, precisely, crowns and beautifies the fountain with a four-leaf clover shape, which is located in a small garden next to the church of San Bartolomé.

A very modified church, it is true, as the vast majority of temples whose towers are in the villages of Almazán and Gómara, but which, unlike some of them, still preserve interesting elements of that architecture, the Romanesque, in which the poetry of the stonemason sowed stanzas in the stone. A stone, in whose apse, and surprisingly, you can still see the identity card, or its 'fecit' foundational, which endorse a longevity not lost at all, after all. Because of lost, and more so as this type of art is concerned, the river of sayings more than murky, is overflowing.

It is true, on the other hand, that observing some of the symbols, one has the sensation -no longer to think about its exclusivity in the province, or at least, regarding the Romanesque of the province that I know today- that the stonemason, for whatever reason, purposely avoided associative magic, which plays with the imagination, to enter into a sack in this is what you see, this is what there is, with the phallic symbol that, what the The spoils of a bull recently fought, roams between two pineapples, similarly to how many centuries later, the thug or the repressed shift graffitied him without any grace in the services of the bars.

And is that observing it, and comparing it with the perfection of the pineapples that, as I say, flank it, I still doubt its romantic exclusivity, and I consider the difference that exists, for example, with that other reference, hidden but perfect in the conjunction of sexes, of the homonymous hermitage of Río Lobos.

But leaving aside an apparent frivolity, whose real meaning, whether it is created or not, probably in the mind and intentions of the stonemason was far from being reduced to a simple matter of sexual promiscuity, the detail does not fail to draw attention, certainly not caused, that the church itself constitutes a small and imaginary 'no man's land' or no-man's land, which divides in two a village in which the ghosts of the past and the future, seem to maintain an epic pulse for a vital hegemony .

On one side, where the walls of the City Hall strut with a decorous and perhaps recent face-lift and power lines support immune party garlands, brightly colored buildings attract the attention of locals and strangers from the foundations of their new architecture.

An architecture that, possibly tending to a comfort whose price (in quotes) is isolation, throws the glove at that other architecture, closer, rural and traditional, which made our towns, beautifully picturesque places and were the non plus ultra of Experienced masons, whose techniques, nowadays, have practically been lost.

It is precisely in them, where one still finds details with a taste of remembrance; memories, perhaps, of childhood itself, where laundry, far from constituting a taboo among neighbors, was as natural a thing as going shopping every day or starting to knit at the portal door. I swear that there is no morbidity in this observation, but respect; And maybe, too, why not say it? A bittersweet stop nostalgia. I'm not going to make the mistake of saying, nor convinced with a small mouth, that any time spent was better. I do not even think about it.

But it is true that these details sometimes make me think that there is still hope for a world gone mad, that it seems that each day more opponents to become a cold, sterile and anodyne society - type Blade Runner - where the only thing that is not Prohibited is to prohibit, and where concepts as a neighbor, are equivalent to being confused with a replicant and being persecuted and exterminated without mercy.

Now I ask, especially those of us who live in big cities: once the neighbors of all their lives have been lost, do we know our new neighbors?

But, finally, I just wanted to talk about a town and it is possible that in the end, unintentionally, I was influenced by the humors of the nearby slurry purifier.

NOTICE: originally posted on my blog SORIA WAY WALK WALKING. Both the text and the photographs are my exclusive intellectual property. The original entry, where you can check the authorship of juancar347, can be found at the following address: https://juancar347.blogspot.com/2011/09/viana-de-duero.html

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