Braga, the sequel

In some ways, a city as old as Braga is very challenging for modern people, especially Americans. It is hard to fathom that this modern place extends back to pre-Roman times. They named it Bracara after the earlier people they conquered to set it up.

If I got the guide description correctly, this stone shows one of the early Christians in the area, from those people, then under the Romans.




Even for me as a Christian, this place is a bit spooky. The cathedral showed plaques, with the names of the all Catholic bishops of Braga, going back to 50 A.D. Somehow I can think of Rome as this old as a major Christian site, an idea we sort of grow up with, but it seems odder for a small town in northern Portugal.

This plaque (also turned 90 degrees -- I think maybe blogger only likes horizontal photos) shows some of the bishops from among the Suevi and Goths, peoples who conquered the city from the Romans, but pretty much got absorbed into Christianity in the process.

There was a fortified Roman city with walls that apparently actually covered more area that the walled medieval city. This photo shows a small street from the original medieval center, which builds on the medieval city wall.

What is almost more interesting is that to people here, it is just a normal residential street, with laundry hanging from windows and old ladies feeding cats.




Braga is one of the original cities of the oldest part of Portugal. It is also very odd to think that these very small places, that now seem like they are on the edge of modern Europe, were the birthplace of a language and culture that became one of the major world languages (fifth largest language group in the world) and still anchors in some ways one of the world's major culture spaces for all kinds of things, from television production (which has been dominated in the Lusophone world by Brazil since the 1970s-- somewhat to the consternation of European Portuguese who found their kids picking up Brazilian slang from telenovelas), to literature and academic thought. There is a whole discussion, set of journals, and sets of thoughts and issues, that most English-speaking scholars never get to hear about.





Just to conclude on that note, here are a couple of very interesting scholars that very few Americans know about. Sonia Virgina Morreira, on the left, is a major historian of radio in Brazil and has done a great deal to get the main Brazilian communication association, INTERCOM, to do a lot of international outreach and joint meetings with other countries, including the U.S.

Moisés de Lemos Martins is from the host school, the University of Minho, and is a classic essayist, very much in the Iberian tradition of very rich, imaginative, almost poetic imagery and language.

Learning languages so you can go to these kinds of meetings and meet these kinds of people is a great experience. American scholars tend to take it much too much for granted that everyone speaks English and does all their best work in English. I just wish I had time to learn Chinese now so I could go to their meetings. I can tell that an amazing literature and tradition in media research is building up there.