East or Easter? Keys to the orientation of Romanesque churches along the Way of Saint James

Abstract

The pilgrimage along the Way of Saint James constituted the principal mechanism for the introduction of new currents of thought into the Iberian Peninsula, such as Romanesque architecture. Taking this into account, we examined whether the standard tradition on the orientation of Christian churches was followed. We measured the orientation of 108 churches built between the end of the 10th and 13th centuries near the French Way, in the ancient kingdoms of Leon and Castile. The statistical analysis shows a clear tendency to orientate the apse of the church eastwards, specifically slightly to the north of due east. Furthermore, we found that the orientation patterns differ from one kingdom to the other. In Leon, there seems to be a predilection for the local tradition of aligning the apse toward the ecclesiastical equinox. Castile, in contrast, built their churches orientated to Easter, one of the most important feast days of Christianity.

Land- and Skyscapes of the Camino de Santiago: An Astronomy and World Heritage Sustainable Approach

“…In total, we measured the orientation of nearly three hundred churches across the Way of Saint James. Appendix A includes new unpublished data belonging to the eastern area of the French Way, completing previous campaigns in the western territories [47,48]. The data include the geographical location of each church, its consecration, and the modern Spanish autonomous region it belongs to.…”

“…In the case of the declination magnitude, the resulting curvigram was then compared with other likely distributions in order to test whether the maxima were statistically significant [17,47,69]. One distribution was obtained from a sample of azimuths homogeneously distributed between 0 • and 359 • for a flat horizon and a latitude of 42 1 /2 • , which is the mean latitude of the churches located along the Way.…”

“…These researchers, along with Urrutia-Aparicio, recently identified Easter Sunday and the ecclesiastical equinox as the two main landmarks for the general orientation patterns of Romanesque churches in the western kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula, which are traversed by the Way of Saint James [47]. Additionally, in a subsequent paper, they conducted a more detailed analysis of these regions and used contrasting samples of churches located at a distance from the Way, thus presenting proof of regional variations within the ancient Christian kingdoms of Castile and Leon [48].…”

Ad orientem: Las iglesias románicas del Camino Francés en los reinos de Castilla y León bajo la perspectiva de la Astronomía Cultural

“…Exceptuando algunos de los trabajos mencionados anteriormente (Romano 1997;Ali y Cunich 2001;Urrutia-Aparicio et al 2021), los precedentes para este tipo de orientaciones son escasos. Aunque es cierto que las iglesias asturianas presentan una concentración similar Figura 11.…”

“…Los datos para las iglesias cercanas al Camino, así como su correspondiente estudio, se pueden encontrar en Urrutia-Aparicio et al (2021), pero se repiten aquí por completitud y homogeneidad de la muestra. Los datos de las muestras de contraste son nuevos, así como el análisis comparativo intra e interregional que se realiza en el presente trabajo.…”