Goa has had a very interesting history and seems to have been a hot potato for nearly 1,500 years. I don't think I can keep the competing Indian princes straight, but in early 1500 the Portuguese came into the picture, with cannons and warships, and took over the anchorages where Goa was to grow piecemeal. The second viceroy, Albuquerque, won the key battle and Goa became the capital of the Portuguese Vice-Kingdom of Asia, which extended from Africa through India, extending all the way out to Malacca (Malaysia), Sumatra, Java and Timor (Indonesia), Macao (China), and Japan. He was sitting pretty.
Old Goa is the old settlement now unique because that is where the Cathedral and the Basilica were built in the 1500's. The cathedral is huge, bigger than anything I have seen in Lisbon, but it is painted white and to my untrained eyes has little architectural value. The basilica is more modest, but has two unique features. First, it hosts the incorrupt body of St. Francis Xavier, who with St. Ignatius Loyola established the Society of Jesus. St. Francis Xavier is considered the missionary/apostle of Asia, and is highly revered. (St. Joseph Vaz, born in Goa, is also widely revered as the missionary of Sri Lanka. He had a hell of a time there, but eventually was welcomed by the Sultan of Kandy and did great missionary work).
The second call to fame of the Basilica is that it is blood red, because it is built with blood red stone blocks. As I got close I thought I was looking at a highly oxidized basalt (and that is the case of a few of the blocks), but the majority of the blocks didn't look like basalt. They had irregular voids, and some were massive whereas other were fragmental. And when you rubbed them, or walked on the wet stones, they were slick with clay. They were blocks carved out of iron laterite! This type of rock is formed by deep weathering of basaltic rocks or lithic gravels, and I later saw some weathering profiles that were a good 10 m deep. They can be used as an iron ore or, as in the basilica, as good dimension stone that is strong but easy to cut.
Eventually, in the 1600's, the city moved to a better location for shipping and laying out a town, New Goa, and from there Portugal dominated the spice trade, leaving the crumbs to the Arabs and the Dutch, for 500 years. New Goa became equal in splendor to Lisbon ("If you have seen Goa, don't bother seeing Lisbon"). Now, as I drove past some of the old neighborhoods, I see magnificent mansions that have been converted to fancy hotels. But it is all a bit subdued, because roads snake through luscious monsoon forests and all sorts of lakes and sloughs, so I had a hard time settling on hard town boundaries.
Modern history is a bit unhappy. When India was granted its independence from the Brits in 1948, they claimed that the Portuguese and French enclaves had to be surrendered to the new Indian Republic. The French agreed, but the Portuguese didn't, claiming that Goa and similar enclaves have been a part of Portugal for 500 years, when India was a collage of independent kingdoms. In 1961 Indian civilians invaded Goa, Portugal responded with force, India did likewise, and 36 hours later the Portuguese garrison surrendered and India took over. Twenty years later Goa was granted statehood, and is now a regular voting member of the Indian union.
My day tour was a bit of a bust (then again, I paid US$ 7 for it, so what can I expect). We did have a good air-conditioned bus, but I was the only "foreign" tourist, so the conversation was in a common Indian language and I only got the Cliff Notes version from the guide, usually in the form of "40 minutes here". My fellow tourists did not want to take a boat tour through the bay, and seemed to be happy hunkering under the AC in the bus. Yet I saw a bit of the coast, the churches of old Goa, a Hindi temple, and a Vishnu temple, and I had an eyeful of green and exotic as we drove through the maze of forest. Tomorrow I will rent a motorcycle and do a bit more exploration on my own.
No comments:
Post a Comment