Day 30: St Jim and the Field of Stars: Part 2
Trip Start
May 29, 2005
1
5
9
Trip End
Jul 29, 2005
Leon,
Spain
Thursday, June 30, 2005
Fast forward 800 years, to a hermit minding his own business, when suddenly there are shooting stars and sweet music beckoning him to the very same place, and lo, he finds the Saint´s bones at Compostela or campus stellae (field of stars). In no time at all, Santiago has been named the patron saint of Spain and visions of him are popping up all over the place, although whether he would appear as kindly Pilgrim or Slayer of the Moors, depended on who was seeing the visions and writing the history books.
In true Christian fashion, an older, Celtic pathway was adopted as the Pilgrimage route to Santiago and thus the route helped protect N. Spain from a) Muslim invaders, b)backsliders falling into old pagan ways, and c) was a nice Medieval moneyspinner for the church along the way.
The popularity of the pilgrimage grew and grew, and not only with the Spanish, as the French created their own routes to join the Spanish ones and even the English joined in (although they cheated and came by boat most of the way). Soon it was up there with Rome and Jerusalem as the place to get your ´get out of purgatory free´ card (if you went in a Holy Year - in any other year you did away with half your purgatory time). If you were lucky and rich, you could even make someone else to do the pilgrimage for you! If you were unlucky and criminal, you might find yourself doing the walk in lieu of prison (or worse).
And so Santiago de Compostela became Europe´s first, and for a couple of centuries, the most popular tourist destination, and the villages and towns along the pilgrimage route flourished and new ones sprang up to cope with the demand. Then, after the Reconquista, the numbers started to peeter out, until by this century only a few stalwarts were walking the way. Then in the 60s, a parish priest published a modern guide-book and lo, the Camino was reborn, with numbers growing steadily year on year until last year 13,000 pilgrims walked the walk, taking with them their ´credencial´ or pilgrim passport, which allows them to stay in special pilgrim hostels along the way, and collecting their ´sellos´or stamps to prove they have done the trip, and making sure they get their ´Compostela´in Santiago, which certifies that they have done the last 100kms and are therefore eligible to 3 free meals at the big posh hotel in Santiago (alas, only in the staff kitchen, though!) and, presumably more importantly, to their time off purgatory.
Thus endeth the history lesson.
PS If you have read this carefully, you may have noticed that we only had to walk the last 100kms to be official pilgrims, instead of walking over 700kms. So far we have walked well over 400kms and still have 311kms to go. Why, oh why, oh why????
