This breaks chronology a bit, but as a distinct daytrip it´s easier to cover now.
Seven easy steps to turn a mosque into a cathedral:
1 - Language is everything. Try just calling it a cathedral and see if you get away with it. Of course, some street signs will need to call it a mosque because that's what it looks like, that's what it is and that's what everyone will ask for. But where possible, all communications from the church should call it a cathedral, or occasionally a mosque-cathedral. Eg the flyer cover is ´The Cathedral Cordoba´.
2 - It's what's inside that counts. So don't do anything to the outside of the mosque. And actually you can leave a lot of the inside too, just stick your columns and displays over the top of everything. The more garish the better, to draw attention away from the remaining mosque structures. Put round columns next to square walls, have arches end half-way down a Wall, stick emblems onto intricately carved murals. So what if it looks a bit Franken-thedral.
3 - You're doing it a favour. Claim you're all about restoring and protecting the mosque. It might have fallen into disrepair if you hadn't defaced it. At heart you're really just a conservationist.
4 - It wasn't a real mosque anyway. Draw attention to any features in the mosque that were influenced by other styles at the time. (Actually i have a little bit of sympathy for this argument but only in terms of the parts of the mosque that pretend to be ceramic mosaics but are actually just painted on.)
5 - If it's used as a cathedral then it is a cathedral. Services are held there – tourists are reminded of this when they´re kicked out for the services. Argument over.
6 - It's payback. They had it coming, an eye for an eye. They built the mosque over a visigoth church. Don´t mention that the visigoth church was used by both Christians and Muslims, and was purchased before it was knocked down to build the mosque. Have lots of exhibits of visigoth bits of churches inside. The flyer literally talks about ´welcome to the cathedral´ then ´the origins´(mentioning only the visigoth church origins) then ´the islamic intervention´.
7 – Carry out a purification ritual, in which each Stone of the edifice is turned into a site consecrated to Christ. I don't understand what that means, I'm just copying that from the flyer, but surely the entire building has been converted if every Stone it´s made from has been converted.
[ Last edited 18/09/2015 09:57pm ]
