Eurp!

      I love this place. This is Europe. The UK was nice, but here, Evora, Portugal is  really Europe.....where we, in 2013, are just a brief flicker amongst so many loves, tragedies, ambitions, frustrations, songs sung and stories told by people living here over millenia.  

     They all live on here together, separated only by the tissue of time.  Ok, I don't know anything about physics (obviously)  but " tissue  of time" sounds right to me, something thin and intermittently translucent. 

     

 Lives through the centuries bump up against one another.  Here is the medieval cathedral, probably at one time a mosque, rubbing shoulders with ...something Roman. 

       Contemporary shops and houses built into the base of a Roman aqueduct. 

       

 I love this particular juxtaposition of the centuries.  In Evora's city hall, a renovation project uncovered a Roman bath buried under the foundation.  It was excavated and you can see it in a room just off the lobby. For light, they left windows open into the offices next door, where city employees work on their computers a few meters from where Romans soak(ed) in their tubs. 

       

And finally, this.  It was in a convent which seemed to be given over at least in part to art exhibits, but I did see nuns around there. Paleolithic megaliths  (Stonehenge-style stones) abound in the area. When the Guardiana River was dammed, some of them were moved and this Stone Age (fertility symbol? ) ended up in the foyer of a ( former?) convent.  

You think what you like; I thought it very odd.