The Hermitage of San Baudelio in Casillas de Berlanga, Soria, is, without a doubt, one of the most interesting Romanesque monuments on the peninsula.
With an external appearance of simple construction, a rectangular nave and a square head, its interior causes an astonishment of deep spirituality: a palm tree, symbol of the tree of life, seems to support the roof of the nave; At the foot of the hermitage, the succession of arches recalls Muslim constructions. Above this arcade there is a gallery that directs its gaze to the apse in the center of which a small chapel was dedicated to the adoration of the Magi. The apse, very high compared to the nave, is accessed by steep stairs. There are thus four different spaces for worship: the apse containing the main altar, the nave, the arcade at the foot of the church and the gallery above it. These differences must have corresponded to the celebration of the Hispanic rite until the Roman liturgy was imposed at an imprecise moment in the s. XII.
The hermitage, then the church of a small monastery, was built on the place where a hermit had probably lived, then a shelter with a small cave. Around the Hermitage you can see the graves of those who inhabited the Monastery and the small population around it.
The entire interior was decorated with paintings that can be divided into two styles: the lower panels are simpler or more primitive and the upper panels with fully Romanesque scenes from the life of the Virgin and the life of Christ.
Unfortunately part of the paintings were ripped off when they were sold, in the 1920s, so that some of his paintings are in New York, Boston and Indianapolis. In exchange for the apse of Fuentidueña, some paintings returned to Spain and can be visited in the Prado Museum. Of them in the Hermitage you can see the traces left by the paintings.
It must have been built in the last half of the 11th century, when after the conquest of this territory south of the Duero by Alfonso VI, King of León, Castile and Galicia, the area was given relative stability and the process of reorganization of the recovered territory began. to Muslims.
The postage stamp reproduces a close-up of the extraordinary cylindrical column in the shape of a stone palm tree. From this immense palm tree eight ribs emerge in the shape of a horseshoe arch as branches that support the sheared vault (attached to the surface of the walls). The palm tree is a Sufi symbol, a sacred tree for the Arabs.
