Day 5: Cusco

                Yesterday marked our first day in Cusco.  After an early flight, we made our way to the hotel, dropped off our luggage, ate lunch, and toured the city center.  Our first stop was the Plaza de Armas, or main square of the city.  The most impressive sights in the plaza are two churches that reveal something about Cusco’s past.  

Standing  on the smooth stone steps of Cusco’s cathedral, it is easy to lose oneself in the context of history—to forget that this plaza has meant something radically different, to different people, throughout time.  We could see towering Spanish churches peak out over clay rooftops and between narrow streets.  We admired the green mountains and snow-capped peaks that envelope it all.  However, were we to have visited 600 years ago, we would have found a city that conveyed dissimilar values and beliefs.

                The Incas believed in three worlds:  the world of the living, the sky world, and the underworld of the dead.  They were represented by the jaguar, condor, and snake, respectively.  Thus, it should come as no surprise that they designed their city in the shape of the first of the three.  The jaguar’s head consisted of the great fortress, Sacsahuayman.  The sexual organs were the temple, Q’orikancha.  The heart was the royal palace—the location of what is now the cathedral.  Instead of stone steps, the Incas had covered the ground in crushed seashells from beaches found hundreds of miles away.  Yet, most incredibly, this empire and much of the city were built within a period of 100 years.  The forces that compelled them to undertake this profound project are beyond my comprehension.  

                Equally astounding is the compulsion seen in the conquest by the Spanish.  Rather than rebuilding the city, they simply built on top of it.  Spanish walls rest amount the more ancient constructions.  What was once the Incan temple of gold is now a temple populated by Dominican nuns.  Large parts of Sacsayhuaman have been scrapped for other projects.  The palace is now the sede of power for the ecclesial authority.  Viewed in this way, the details of the beliefs and values of the two cultures are different but, perhaps the forces were the same.  One power was removed; another replaced it and converted it to serve similar functions but under a different name.

                This city, which is a stone testament to the Wari, Incan, and Spanish peoples is perhaps an appropriate metaphor for Peruvian culture as a whole.  It tells the story of great minds and the power that possessed them.  It also shows a history of domination and repression.  Yet, in the end, all parts make up the whole.  Though we have spent much time studying the past of this place, it would be incomplete without understanding its connection to the present.