Imaging the Middle Ages: Twenty-First Century Revitalizations at Santiago de Compostela

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Abstract: Since the Middle Ages, Santiago de Compostela has been home to one of the most famous pilgrimage destinations in Europe. Throughout its history, its success as a pilgrimage site has most often been signaled by large-scale building projects. This essay addresses how Peter Eisenman's Cidade da Cultura de Galicia (CCG), an architectural complex and cultural center overlooking Santiago de Compostela, mediates and responds to contemporary efforts toward the production and revitalization of the pilgrim experience within the city. While not as obvious as the interventions that occur along the route, the CCG is in fact a materialization of the goals of the revitalization initiative, a vision of secularized touristic pilgrimage for the twenty-first century, which is enacted through Compostela's successful image economy. The twentieth-century revitalization efforts are peculiar for the distinctive nature of their engagement with a medieval past, and the strong connections drawn between modern pilgrimage and its medieval counterpart. This article is concerned with the material evidence of competing interests in the revitalization process and specifically with how they relate to institutional interventions initiated by the regional government. The regional government's interests were often pursued in monumental form: in the late twentieth century, the Xunta operationalized a comprehensive cultural policy that was principally enacted in architecture. Examining the CCG's own past, as well as the medieval narrative of Compostela's history that it materializes, offers a new framework for understanding the role of built space in—and its relation to—the politics of pilgrimage revitalization within the twenty-first-century context.