Santa Cruz de la Serós
Camino Aragonés · Camino Catalán por San Juan de la Peña
HuescaAragón
Here Camino Aragonés and Camino Catalán por San Juan de la Peña converge. It is one of the points where the pilgrim shares the way with those arriving by another route.
Three-member compound. Santa Cruz is a Christian invocation (Latin Sancta Crux); de la Serós derives from the Latin sororum ('of the sisters'), genitive plural of soror ('sister'). The popular Aragonese form Serós collectively names the nuns of the old Benedictine female monastery of the place, whose 11th-century Romanesque church of Santa María gave name to the whole complex.
Evolution of the name
- sororum Latin 1st centuries BC–9th
- Sorores / Serors medieval Latin 10th–11th centuries
- Santa Crux de las Serós medieval Aragonese from the 12th century
Reflections, to the letter
The name keeps the sorores, the sisters: Benedictine nuns who held a female monastery founded here in the 10th century. That community is still legible in the stone itself. Above the nave vault of Santa Maria rises the camara, an octagonal body fused to the tower that housed the small community, a chamber without parallel in Aragonese Romanesque. Beneath that cube lived the serors who named the valley, among them Countess Sancha, daughter of Ramiro I.
Glossary
- Attested
- A form or word documented in writing in historical sources; opposed to "reconstructed" (forms proposed by comparative inference but not actually documented).
- Christogram
- Christological monogram formed by the Greek letters chi (X) and rho (P), initials of Khristós ('Christ, anointed one'), sometimes accompanied by the letters alpha and omega (beginning and end). In 11th-century Aragonese Romanesque it was carved monumentally on the tympana of doorways, surrounded by lions, angels and vegetal elements. That of the cathedral of Jaca, around 1063, is the first monumental Christogram of peninsular Romanesque.
- Palatalisation
- A phonetic shift in which a sound is articulated against the palate. In Castilian: Latin nn → ñ (annus → año); preserved initial pl- (planus → plano) versus Asturleonese palatalisation to ll- (Llanes).
- Paleo-Christian
- Of the earliest Christianity, before the 6th century; applied to early churches, martyrs and liturgical practices.
- Squinch
- Architectural transition element that allows the seating of a dome or octagonal lantern on a square plan. It resolves the four corners of the square through small fan vaults that convert the quadrangular plan into octagonal. The squinch appears in Aragonese and Catalan Romanesque from the 11th century; the cathedral of Jaca and the church of Santa María of Santa Cruz de la Serós are the two first Hispanic examples.
Sources
- Borrás Gualis, G.M. — Arte aragonés medieval
- Buesa Conde, D. — Santa Cruz de la Serós
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Camino Aragonés