The Mezquita of Córdoba

The Mezquita is the clearest European example of a sacred building that changed religion by conquest and has stayed changed, and of how unresolved that can remain eight centuries later.

The building

Begun in 785-786 under Abd al-Rahman I, reportedly on the site of the Visigothic church of St Vincent, though the traditional account of a shared building bought out in stages rests on thin archaeology. Four successive expansions carried it to its present extent by the end of the tenth century. The hypostyle hall of double horseshoe arches in red brick and white stone, and the mihrab with its gold mosaics sent by a Byzantine emperor, make it the outstanding surviving monument of al-Andalus.

1236: Ferdinand III of Castile took Cordoba and the mosque was consecrated as a cathedral within months.

1523: a Renaissance cathedral nave was driven up through the middle of the hall. Charles V is traditionally said to have regretted approving it, the remark attributed to him, that they had built what could be built anywhere and destroyed what was unique in the world, is repeated everywhere and documented nowhere contemporary. Treat it as a good story.

The ownership question

In 2006 the Catholic Church registered the building in its own name in the Spanish property register, for a nominal sum, using a provision of mortgage law that permitted the Church to register property without producing a title deed, a mechanism originally designed for parish churches and since amended.

Cordoban civic groups, academics and regional politicians objected that a monument of that significance, maintained in part with public money and visited by close to two million people a year, is public patrimony and cannot be converted to private ownership by a registry filing. Petitions gathered hundreds of thousands of signatures. Litigation and political attempts to reverse the registration have not dislodged it.

The prayer question

Muslim prayer inside the building is prohibited. The prohibition is the Church's, and it has been maintained through repeated requests from Spanish Muslim organisations and from bodies abroad, and through at least one confrontation in 2010 in which a group of visitors prayed inside and security staff intervened, with injuries and arrests.

The Church's position is that the building is a consecrated cathedral, that shared worship in one space is not workable, and that it has no obligation to reintroduce a use ended in 1236. Those asking cite the building's origin and the coexistence Cordoba is famous for. Spanish Muslim organisations have generally framed the request as symbolic; Church authorities have generally treated it as a claim on the building.

The name

Church signage and publications have moved toward calling the building simply the Cathedral of Cordoba, or the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption, and away from the compound Mosque-Cathedral. Campaigners read the shift as an attempt to write the mosque out of the building's description; the diocese replies that it is accurate about what the building now is.

Nobody disputes any fact in the paragraphs above. The disagreement is entirely about what follows from them.

The Mezquita's most striking feature is a design solution to a practical problem, and its most famous alteration is a monument its own patron reportedly regretted.

Arches stacked to gain height

Builders needed a tall prayer hall but had only short reused Roman and Visigothic columns to work with, and solved the problem by stacking two tiers of arches, alternating red brick and white stone voussoirs, on top of the columns, a design producing the mosque's famous striped double arcade and letting a low column support a much taller roof than its height alone would allow. The mihrab, added under Caliph al-Hakam II in the tenth century, is decorated with Byzantine glass mosaic, made by craftsmen reportedly sent specifically for the purpose by the Byzantine emperor at the caliph's request.

A cathedral built into the middle of it

In the sixteenth century, a Renaissance cathedral nave was constructed directly through the centre of the mosque's columned hall, a project undertaken with royal permission from Charles V, who is widely reported to have later regretted authorising it, on the grounds that the insertion destroyed something unique to build something that could have been built anywhere, a reaction frequently repeated in accounts of the building though not verifiable to an exact original wording.

One building, two structures still visible

The result is a single building in which the original mosque's forest of arches surrounds the inserted cathedral rather than either structure being removed to accommodate the other, a physical compromise that has outlasted the dispute over its wisdom.