Entwined

In other news, renovation of a tapas bar near the cathedral in Sevilla (taking advantage of covid-related closure) uncovered something remarkable. Their space, which they thought had been constructed in the neomudéjar style a century ago, is in fact the real deal: a Muslim bathhouse (hammam) built almost a millennium ago! It's stunning that the building, and so much of its ornamentation, should have been so sturdy as to have survived centuries of reuse and forgetting. (Brick and stone structures, I suppose, last longer than wood, and are harder to remove than to reuse.) I'm not sure why this find makes me so happy: the improbable survival of the distant past? the ways the past is present, hidden all around us, holding us even as we forget it? (well, in the old worlds; settler colonial societies bank on erasing the past.) Maybe it's the way Islamic geometric design seems to articulate just such beautiful patterns and mysteries?