ÜPeter Handke writes at one point about the narrator of his book “Versuch über die Jukebox”, which is set in the Spanish city of Soria, among other places: “He just wanted to record and accept what was going on before he lost sight of it a thing mean to you and, above all, what could emanate from a mere thing.”
What can emanate from a thing like a book, which in turn emanates from a city like Soria and the surrounding countryside, has long been inextricably linked in my fantasies with my own explorations of the city of Soria and the surrounding countryside. So that when I come back – and I will come back as long as I can – I always discover something new and old at the same time, which will result in completely different, maybe surprising mixtures in the future.
Soria is the name of a Spanish province and at the same time its capital. You’ll have to ask around a bit before you meet anyone who knows Spain travelers, but the country’s smallest provincial capital is just under a two-hour drive from Madrid down empty roads to the northeast. The summers are much cooler here than in Madrid, the winters severe and probably bleak in the eyes of most. One of the hallmarks of Soria is emptiness, another is vastness, if they are not almost the same.
“The Spirit of All Spain”
Antonio Machado (1875 to 1939), the poet of Castile, sang of this landscape, sometimes lovely, sometimes rugged and wild, at different times of the year, in calm and in turmoil, in peace and in war, and who wrote his cycle of poems “Castillian Landscapes”, the undisputed classic of this region, if you read carefully, you will find descriptions of almost every tree, bush and herb in it. Right through it – in summer like silver through a bed of green – flows the Duero, which westwards, in Portugal, is called Douro and flows into the Atlantic in Porto. But how far is Porto from Soria!
In the epilogue to Ammann Verlag’s beautiful Machado edition, the translator Fritz Vogelgsang writes that Soria is perhaps “the most spiritual of this spiritual Castile, which itself is the spirit of all of Spain” and that there is nothing in this city “that amazes or what shines and roars”. Soria, he continues, is “a teacher of Castilian nature who always asks us to be what we are and nothing more”.
It is immediately audible that we are in the midst of Spanish mysticism, which carelessly skips centuries, but that too is part of Soria: the connection to times long past can be felt much more directly than in other places, and perhaps it was this preservation , conservative in the truest sense of the word, which at the time prompted the philosopher Julían Marías and his family to spend the summer here, his son Javier wrote wonderfully about it.
A landscape as beautiful as in Machado’s times
Fifteen years ago, in Soria, I met Count Amalio de Marichalar, from whom they wanted to take more than a hundred hectares of his land to build an industrial park, the expropriation had already been decided by the city. It wasn’t so much the fact that the count’s family has been documented in Soria for eight hundred years that interested me in the case; it was the stubborn man’s resistance to official destruction and corruption.
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