There are so many backlogged (backblogged?) things that we’ve been meaning to post about.  Here’s a quick one…

One of our discoveries shortly before we left Madrid was a genuine Egyptian temple sitting in the middle of the Parque de Rosales near the Royal Palace:

El Templo de Debod, Madrid Spain

The story is the Temple of Debod was in the Nile river basin south of Aswan and would have been flooded out by the lake generated by the Aswan High Dam project.  In order to save it and in gratitude for their assistance with other temple projects, the government of Egypt gave it to Spain and it was moved to Madrid, stone by stone.

It was a bit of a surprise to us to find it here.  It turns out that there are bits of Egypt floating around other grand cities of Europe — Paris and London both have obelisks donated by Egypt and, of course, the British museum and the Louvre both have extensive Egypt collections that were not precisely donated…  Still, it was an unexpected and lovely find.

We got there fairly late in the day, so we only got a couple of nice pictures.  (And, like many museums, no pictures were allowed inside at all.)  But I particularly liked this one:

Temple of Debod, view down the causeway

It turned out to be tiny and cramped inside.  Which, I suppose, should not be surprising, given the size of the total structure and its provenance.  But we’re used to thinking of the grand temples and vast cathedrals, with huge, vaulted spaces.  Finding a tiny, cramped space was a reminder of just how expensive building was through most of human history.  (And still is, to those of us holding mortgages.  :-)  More meditations on that point later…