A medievalização da memória. O Mosteiro da Batalha e a Primeira Guerra Mundial

Duarte Manuel Freitas; Sérgio Gonçalo Neto

doi:10.14195/0870-4147_56_11

Authors

Duarte Manuel Freitas Universidade Autónoma de Lisboa | Universidade de Évora, Centro Interdisciplinar de História, Culturas e Sociedades (CIDEHUS) https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6764-6872
Sérgio Neto Universidade do Porto, Centro de Investigação Transdisciplinar ‘Cultura, Espaço e Memória’ (CITCEM), Faculdade de Letras https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9737-0029

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.14195/0870-4147_56_11

Keywords:

First World War, Unknown Soldier, Sites of Memory, Medievalisation, Monastery of Batalha

Abstract

The Monastery of Batalha [Battle] was erected to commemorate the Battle of Aljubarrota (1385), a decisive engagement that secured Portuguese independence. The monastery became the pantheon of the Avis Dynasty (linked to maritime expansionism). In this regard, during the 19th and 20th centuries, Batalha was a generator of nationalist memories since the building symbolised the Portuguese “Golden Age”. Historian Alexandre Herculano even wrote a well-known novel, The Vault, in which he romanticised the Middle Ages, based on an episode in the construction of that building.

In 1921, the anticlerical regime of the First Republic devised a sort of rapprochement with the Catholic (and civil) religion through the inhumation of two unknown soldiers of the First World War (1914-1918). Buried in the Chapter House of a late Medieval monastery, the unknown soldiers were guarded by the “eternal flame” of the lampstand designed by António Gonçalves and executed by Lourenço Chaves de Almeida, a work also with clear medievalist overtones. The process was complemented by several theatre plays and poems that interconnected past and present, as well as the later addition of the statue of Christ of the Trenches.

The following article analyses how the First World War was memorialised in Portugal through a medievalist lens, with the Monastery of Batalha as its focal point.