The Way of St. James (Camino de Santiago). Sepulcher | Documentary Part 3

The Way of Saint James (Camino de Santiago) is the perfect mix of touristic-sports adventure and religious sentiment. This documentary shows all of the story from the origins until today.
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The discovery of the sepulcher of the Apostle Santiago, in the first third of the IX century, compelled many Christians to make pilgrimages to Compostela to worship his relics.
This required the construction of a church. This building, besides guarding and honoring the relics of the Apostle and his disciples Teodoro and Atanasio, had to take in a greater number of pilgrims coming from the Peninsular kingdoms, as well as from the rest of Europe. The purpose of its builders was not only to construct the most perfect church dedicated to the cult of the pilgrims; they wanted to make Compostela a religious and artistic reference for the world, like Rome and Jerusalem.
These are the beginnings of a fascinating story, a fabulous saga spanning centuries carried out
by thousands of people united in their devotion to the figure of the Apostle Santiago, in a remote corner of Finisterre. They called it Compostela: the field of stars.
The present state of the Santiago Cathedral is the result of numerous changes, projects, works, remodeling; in short, an evolving and impassioned architectural and artistic creation developed throughout many centuries.

▶ Sepulcher: Third part of the documentary The way of ST. James (Camino de Santiago). The Temple of stars.

We fly over the city of Santiago. From up here, we can see the cathedral and near it, the church of San Félix de Solovio. Thus according to archeological research, we can imagine the situation in the year 1.
Where the cathedral now stands, there would have been a small Roman fortification, and in place of the church of San Félix, a small village of farmers, located on an ancient fort of Celtic origin.
And it is in this place where chronicles tell of a hermit known as Pelayo who, as he fasted, observed some lights shining on the ancient Roman citadel. But Pelayo was not the only one to contemplate this phenomenon some shepherds were also witness to the strange lights. The event reached Teodomiro, the bishop of Iría-Flavia, which was back then the Episcopal See, and today is a parish in the Padrón municipality.

Before such news, the bishop arrived at the site and discovered the entrance to a small sepulcher among the weeds. He discovered three tombs a few meters underground: the middle one protected by a slab of marble. Teodomiro did not hesitate to attribute these burials to the St. James and his disciples Teodoro and Atanasio. Alfonso II, King of Asturias, decided to erect a basic but well-stocked sanctuary. A church was built above the sepulcher to worship the Apostle’s relics, and beside it, the small monastery of Antealtares, to house the community of monks that would look after the so-called Locus Santi Iacobi. Construction was finished in 830 and Bishop Teodomiro consecrated the first Church of Santiago. Exactly where four centuries earlier a Roman village existed, the primordial nucleus of the future cathedral and city of Santiago now surged.

One of the main finds of the 1955 digs was the sepulchral cover of Bishop Teodomiro, a transcendental figure in this story. It was he who revealed the nature of the sepulcher that was found thanks to those miraculous signals. After the death of Teodomiro, two events took place in the middle of the IX century that would be key to both the propagation of the fervor for the Saint Apostle, as well as to the development of the small Compostelan nucleus.
The first – part myth, part reality – took place in the battle of Clavijo. King Ramiro I’s Christian armies pulled back from the advances of Abderrahman II. Suddenly, St. James appeared on a white horse, causing the Saracen troops to disband and fall in defeat. From this point, the Apostle became the defender of Christianity against the infidels, and king Ramiro I established the Santiago Vow, forcing everyone to hand over their first harvests to the Church of the Apostle every year.
In the late IX century, the Bishop of Iría-Flavia built more solid and majestic church upon the former one, thanks to the help of king Alfonso III, the Great. The new Basilica was consecrated in the year 899.

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