One day while we were staying in
Madrid, we took a day trip to Toledo. Toledo is a very pretty city with lots of
cute narrow streets….that were also very windy and there were a lot of hills.
Luckily, we actually guessed a
pretty good route towards the tourism office and once we had a map, we
generally didn’t have any problems. The only hard part was when the map didn’t
show changes in altitude…
While in Toledo we visited La Casa
del Greco, el Museo Sefardi, la Mezquita and la Alcázar.
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| La Casa del Greco |
El Greco is an artist originally
from Greece, hence the name, who eventually moved to Toledo. I did a project on
him for Spanish class in high school, so I was really excited to see some of
his works. Pictures weren’t technically allowed, but I did sneak this one.
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| View and Plan of Toledo |
View
of Toledo is my favorite work by El Greco, but it is in the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York, so we weren’t able to see it.
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| View of Toledo |
Sefardi Museum is a former
synagogue that is now a museum to the Jewish people and in all of Spain. We
learned a lot of things, but also left with a lot of questions. There were
menorahs both with 7 branches and 9 branches. Anyone know anything about
menorahs and why they might have a different number of branches?
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| Used to hold the Torah scroll |
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| Chair used when circumcising babies |
The mosque in Toledo was actually
quite small. When the Christians took over, they turned it into a church and
added an addition, which basically doubled the size.
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| Original mosque |
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| Christian addition |
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| You can see where the addition is. |
Finally, the Alcazar, which means
fortress. I expected it to be more of what a fortress was like, but it’s
actually a museum for the Spanish army. Which isn’t really my thing. But, it
was free for students, so it was okay. We didn’t spend too much time there. We
went through the section of history that we had just learned about in our
Spanish history class and that was about it.
Overall, I really enjoyed Toledo. It's a very beautiful city with a lot of cool history.
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