Church and Mosque of El Salvador

I accidentally stumbled on a tour of the Church of El Salvador by Toledo's Art Council. It was free, and I have been searching high and low for chances to get into some of these old churches, so I happily stood in line for 30 minutes for the free tour.

The church, it turns out, was a mosque. You can tell because the bell tower stands separate from the church itself, or at least it did until the 1550 remodeling. This is typical of mosques, where the minaret is always its own building.

So inside the otherwise usual looking Mudejar/Romanesque church is a very carefully restored mosque, complete with horseshoe arches, recycled Roman and Visigothic columns, and the lovely geometry of Islamic architecture.

The most interesting detail was the recycled Gothic column which was decorated with scenes of the miracles of Jesus. The Muslims liked the story and placed the column front and center in the mosque, but there was the little issue of graven images. So they destroyed the faces of all the figures, but left the rest intact to continue to commemorate the story of Jesus, without dishonoring him by pretending to know what he actually looked like (that's the gist of the whole image issue). Very neat to see.