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VILLAGE “FREES” MOORISH KING AT LAST
Michael Coy / 2009-11-14 10:55:41
The village of Canillas de Aceituno, situated in the mountains north of Velez-Malaga, has unchained King Boabdil. He now appears unrestricted on the village’s coat of arms.
“Because it is racist and hostile to foreigners,” said the petition sent by Canillas de Aceituno to the Junta de Andalucia. The local council was asking for the chain around the neck of a Moorish king who died 500 years ago to be removed from the Canillas coat of arms. To the delight of locals, the Junta has acceded to the request, and Boabdil will now be freed.
The mayor of Canillas, Don Jose Manuel Aranda, said this week that “our petition has been successful. Our aim was to eliminate racist and anti-foreigner elements from our village heraldry, because they are things which belong to a confrontation of past centuries.” He added that the chain which was fastened around the neck of Boabdil’s image “had come to symbolise slavery and inequality, and to represent the struggle for dominion between Europeans and Arabs.” The new coat of arms, with no chain, will be registered with Spain’s College of Heraldry in the next few weeks.
The real Boabdil was a fascinating character. He was the very last Arabic king to occupy a throne in Europe, ruling over the tiny Kingdom of Granada. Driven from that throne in 1492, he fought a guerrilla action in the mountains for a few miserable years, before retreating to Africa.
As he left his kingdom in 1492, having handed over the keys of Granada to Ferdinand and Isabella, he paused at a mountain pass near the present-day village of Otura and wept, looking back on what he had lost. His elderly mother, who was in the entourage, scolded him for “crying like a woman over what he failed to defend like a man”.
Ever since, the pass has been known as “The Sigh of the Moor”. His defeat was seen at the time as a great triumph for Christianity, and depicting him chained was an unmistakeable gesture of European triumphalism.
“Canillas de Aceituno”, as a village name, is thought to derive from the age-old practice of beating ripe olives down from the tree at harvest time. Canillas is currently governed by the PSOE, Spain’s equivalent of the British Labour Party, and the village council is strongly anti-racist. Three other villages of the interior are known to have coats of arms featuring Boabdil in chains.
It will be interesting to see if they follow Canillas’ lead, and iof Boabdil’s 500 years of custody are finally comin
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