Cusco: Day 2, Simon Visits the Colonial Sites

Simon set out on a massive undertaking: to explore all the significant churches of central Cusco before lunch! And providing a pictorial record of this marathon turned out to be rather tricky, as photography is entirely prohibited in all these locations. It's amazing what you can achieve, though, by hiding behind a pillar with your Leica stashed under your raincoat. And the dimly-lit interiors throw in just one extra hurdle.
Anyways, seeing as we are living uphill in the fantastic, village-like quarter of San Blas, it was to the small, modest (yet in many ways, retrospectively, the most impressive of all the sites with its devotional atmosphere) church of the same name that Simon turned to first.

The carved, wooden pulpit was astonishing.

The reredos behind the High Altar had been carefully restored and narrates an entire devotional approach to parochial worship.

The Crucifixion in a small side chapel was especially striking. San Blas radiates a very special atmosphere, and of course, it's not a museum, but the living centre of life around the square.

It was then downhill to the Archbishop's Palace, built on a firm foundation of massive Inca stones, including the famous twelve-sided stone, pointed out to all passer-by with enthusiasm (and an outstretched hand...) by all the street children. Here is to be found a collection of sacred art from the Cusco School. Well worth a visit! It was then on to visit the Sagrada Familia, Cathedral and Triunfo. Over an hour of golden retables, silver altars and cedar wood carving. Splendid! The cathedral coro also houses two recently restored seventeenth-century organs, the whole plan being modelled on Toledo!

The church of Santa Clara is still to this day the working convent church of the enclosed order of Clarist nuns. They view this dark and mysterious interior from behind a series of dense, wooden grilles.

Here is La Compania; the Jesuits get everywhere, don't they? This East end is almost identical to the version in Quito which Simon visited almost four years ago. Note the golden grilles to the right which shield the musicians from view. Perhaps the singing floated downwards, mysteriously as if directly from heaven.
Then there was time to pop in to the Convent of Saint Catherine of Siena, where there are thirteen contemplatie Domenican nuns in residence. During the Inca period the site was the location of the Aqllawasi, where beautiful maidens of noble lineage would perform sacred duties and sun worship, never leaving and forever remaining virgins. Some time after 1605, the 25 nuns who had arrived in Cusco from Arequipa selected this site for its significant associations. Today Simon met just two of these elusive women.

Well, the mission wasn't entirely successful: lunch at Gustavo's had to intervene, and magically, Jon and Simon's respective missions were united during the afternoon: a huge buidling which unites both Inca and Spanish architecture. Qorikancha was the high temple of Incan worship to the celestial deities of sun, moon, stars, rainbows and lightening. The conquistadores turned this building into the monastery of Santo Domingo. Can you tell the Incan stones apart from the renaissance Spanish designs? In the next blog you can see how Jon manages to fit through the sacred Incan archway.