The Forgotten Royal Pantheon: Oña

Oña
Photos in this post 2019 Jessica Knauss  

The area where my castle is, the Merindades, surprises again and again with its exceptional natural beauty and historical value. The same day we visited my castle, my friend and I returned to Burgos via Oña, a place of old glory I'd hardly ever heard about, in spite of how pertinent it turned out to be to my historical and novel-writing interests.

We pulled into a parking lot near the old train station and found a quaint place to have our midday meal before taking a personal guided tour--what a luxury! We got to ask questions about what interested us and look at all the wonders at our own pace. The drawback for this blog is that no photos were allowed. I haven't found anything usable online, either, so we'll have to make do with my exterior and cloister shots and your readerly imagination.

As I mentioned in my castle post, the Merindades area was the forge of the Castilian character, the ancestral home of modern Spain. Oña in particular was staggeringly important throughout the Middle Ages, and for that reason, it's a melting pot of architectural styles that is fun to study and untangle. 

As readers of Seven Noble Knights will know, before Castile was a kingdom, it was a semi-independent county of León, and history honors four Counts of Castile. The third such count, Sancho García (the son of Count García of Seven Noble Knights fame) established the double monastery (both monks and nuns) at Oña in 1011 so that his daughter, Tigridia, could be the abbess. The area was particularly strategic in holding the Castilian border against half-amicable Navarrese encroachment. In 1033 it became a monks-only monastery under the Benedictine rule, and enjoyed prosperity and kept the most records of any medieval monastery in northern Spain until the State seized all Church property to balance the budget. Oña was sold off in two parcels in 1836. The area with the monks' dorms and living areas, library, and fish hatchery has since then been used as a Jesuit school, but now stands empty. We were only able to visit the sanctuary and cloister. 

Looking down on the Plaza Mayor of Oña from the monastery 

Our guide waits for the right moment to start our tour. 

The bell gable was the last element to be added, in the nineteenth century,
after the Romanesque tower fell.  

The gate was part of a defensive city wall

erected in the fourteenth century. The statuettes 

are portraits of the royals buried inside. 

Tigridia became a saint during her time here as abbess. We admired a Baroque altar with her casket, then a recently revealed lineal Gothic mural depicting the entire life of St. Mary the Egyptian, a stunning Romanesque-Gothic transition Crucifixion surrounded by a gorgeous Flemish-Spanish fifteenth-century altar, and two Romanesque capitals up so high I couldn't tell what they represented, complete with original paint. I won't complain anymore about high-up Romanesque capitals because I'm taking a course in Romanesque symbolism. Now I know that height was just as important to Romanesque artists for looking up toward God as it was for Gothic artists. They just went about it in diametrically different ways.

The statuettes make the pantheon the first aspect the visitor encounters at the monastery. 

Another important resident here was Fray Pedro Ponce de León. He arrived in 1536 and took on the education of two noble children who had been deaf from birth. He is credited with creating the precursor of sign language.

The door is Romanesque-Gothic transition, but the windows are fully Romanesque. 

After my friend and I admired a well-preserved Baroque organ and an extraordinary Gothic choir carved from walnut by the monks themselves, we got an eyeful of the main altar and the royal pantheon to either side of it.

The Gothic cloister 

The main altar consists of a tall, frothy Baroque tabernacle of gold curlicues surrounding the sixteenth-century gold, silver, and gemstone (probably glass pieces) casket of Saint Íñigo, one of  the first and strictest abbots of the monastery. My friend thought we could easily buy my castle with the gold and silver in the casket alone, and he may be right.

But the pantheon is where it's at. Oña was always a place of noble burials, and they think the entryway between the gate and the door may have served as the first cemetery. The remains were transferred to the Chapel of the Virgin by order of Sancho IV (son of Alfonso X) in 1285. By the late fifteenth century, even this was deemed inadequate, and the remains were moved to flank the main altar and new tombs constructed.

Tomb of a twelfth-century nobleman of La Bureba in the Gothic cloister 

The "new" royal tombs stand out because they aren't made of stone, but of walnut and boxwood. Their wooden tabernacles are smooth extensions of the Gothic traceries of the choir seating, and luxuriously carved and embossed tombs are surrounded by Flemish-Spanish paintings. On the left, four royal tombs, and on the right, four tombs of counts and other royals. The organization and setting give the impression of utmost respect if not adoration of these historical figures by the people who made the tombs. A sense of plenitude and perfection filled the area.

The Renaissance tomb of Bishop Pedro Gonzalez Manso (d. 1539) in the cloister
is backed with a Romanesque grille. 

On the royal side, we find the tomb of Sancho II, whose body was brought here personally by his devoted vassal, El Cid. This king was famously assassinated in Zamora in 1072. Next to Sancho II, we find Sancho III of Navarra (d. 1035), probably the most important and influential king of that small country. Next to Sancho III rests his wife and queen, Mayor. Finally, we contemplate the tomb of Prince García, son of Alfonso VII of Castile. The lad was studying at the monastery when he passed away at the age of 8.

Cloisters achieve a sense of upward pull by planting trees. 

The count side is full of people I want to write novels about. First, the third Count of Castile, Sancho García. As I mentioned, he's the son of Count García in Seven Noble Knights, and in 1002, Sancho defeated the mighty Almanzor (who also appears in Seven Noble Knights) at Calatañazor, as well as founding this monastery. Sancho will have a few important things to do in the sequel to Seven Noble Knights, if I ever get to write it! Next to him rests his wife, Countess Urraca.

Next to his mother lies Prince García, who was the fourth and last Count of Castile. His story is part of the foundation of the Kingdom of Castile, and I've been dreaming of writing a separate novel about him. I wish I could describe how much it meant to me to be in the presence of the tombs of the people whose stories I want so much to tell. 

The final tomb holds the remains of two of Sancho IV's children. 

The sacristy is a rococo museum with the biggest drawers I believe I will ever see for the monks to put their robes in without folding, and the inestimable treasure of the funeral robes of Sancho García. These consist of linen embroidered with silk and 21-karat gold threads in Muslim Córdoba nearly one hundred years before the count's death. This was the finest fabric money could buy a thousand years ago, and I have to say, modern machines can't do better. 

The chapter house had marvelous Romanesque archways with original paint and a display of column capitals I'm always willing to spend a few minutes with. 

After enjoying the Gothic cloister, we found a lovely book full of photos and history at the gift stand near the exit, only to find out that the author had been our tour guide! As we headed down the steps to the tourism office to get his authorial signature, I realized my watch wasn't attached to my wrist. It's not an expensive watch, but I bought it while I was studying in Salamanca, around the time I dreamed I had an artists' colony in a Spanish castle, and it's been with me every day for thirteen years. I marveled that I should lose such an item in this historical place. 

After our guide signed the book we'd just bought, he called the monastery and told my friend and me they would let us back in to look around. So we got two visits for the price of one! It was hard to look at the floor with so many medieval artistic wonders higher up. We felt strongly that we would've heard the watch hit the hard flooring throughout most of the complex. Only one place lacked the hard floor--the cloister, where the burbling fountain might also have impeded our noticing anything amiss. That's where we found it. The thirteen-year legacy of my Salamancan watch will continue, hopefully for another thirteen years or more. 

I had the clasp tightened at a watch repair store the next day.