The Quest for the Holy Grail

Huge bonfires were burning in the squares of Valencia when we were there in March 2012. It is about the famous Faljas festival, which goes back to the Middle Ages. At that time, near the end of winter, on March 19, on the feast of St. Joseph, local artisans brought their unsold handicrafts and the waste produced during their production to the squares and burned them as a sign of welcoming spring. In the 20th century, from year to year, the aesthetic and artisanal dolls that burn in the squares became more and more perfect, that you just feel sorry when you look at them because you know how it is possible that all that beauty will disappear in the flames of St. Joseph's Night.

A decade later, a direct flight from Belgrade by the Air Serbia company brought us back to this magical city, which in 11 years has become visibly richer, more orderly and "bustier".

"This is largely due to the port where a large part of the cocaine arriving from Latin America arrives in Europe. It is no coincidence that Luka Bojović was arrested there in February 2012. In the 21st century, Valencia flourished because of that money, a lot of new buildings came up, big money also flowed into the city coffers... It's just that they, unlike us, know how to reconcile publicly and private, so in the end it all looks as it should!", a friend who has an apartment in Valencia explains to me on the way.

So, we arrived on the morning flight from Belgrade and after paella washed down with a bottle of "Rioha" wine, we headed towards the city center, which you can reach by an easy one-hour walk along the dry bed of the Turia river.

After the catastrophic flood of 1957, when the Turia overflowed, flooding two-thirds of Valencia and killing 81 inhabitants, the city fathers decided to move the course of the river to the western suburbs, and in its old bed to create a spectacular park crossed by old and new bridges, which have since to this day it is constantly being upgraded, it has cycling and jogging paths, fountains, the magnificent Calatrava museum and palaces, outdoor children's playgrounds, botanical gardens and dozens other contents. I often recommend to politicians from the Balkans, when they come to Valencia, Barcelona, ​​Seville or Bilbao, that apart from the restaurants, stadiums and shops, they pay attention to how the Spanish organize their cities.

In the city center, many streets are blocked even for pedestrians because it is January 5 and the procession is expected to start in honor of the Three Kings holiday. On the Queen's Square (Placa de la Reina) where the Cathedral is located, we sit in the garden of one of the cafes where we are supposed to meet Michel Saint Lot and his wife Katya. Michel, a native of Haiti, was the director of UNICEF in Belgrade until four years ago. Michel and Katja advise us where to try the best "curoses", a local specialty, pastries similar to thin tulumbas that are dipped in melted chocolate. We often get up from the table to see the Three Kings procession, and Katja advises me to put a backpack on my back every time: "Valencia is not like Barcelona, ​​there are fewer street thefts, but you still have to be careful, especially on days like this!"

The next morning, I arrive at the city's central train station – the North Station. In 1917, while the rest of Europe was bleeding into the fourth year of the Great War, in neutral Spain, the lavish Estación del Norte railway station opened in Valencia on the site of an old station building from 1852. The god of war came 20 years later when, in 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, the station was bombed from the air. It is located in the very center of the city and annually 15 million passengers pass through it.

Not far from the station is the Mercado Central, the Main Market in Valencia, whose construction began in 1914 and was completed in 1928 and is one of the largest covered markets in Europe, covering 8.000 m2. In the middle of the space during the Christmas holidays, a model of the biblical Bethlehem dominated, and the smells, colors and tastes of this region spread in all directions: fruits, vegetables, fish, hams, cheese, oriental sweets left over (as well as hammams) from the time of Moorish rule over peninsula.

In Kraljičina Square, a large tyrannosaurus puppet moves, in front of it a container for inserting coins. We stare at it, we are not sure if there is a man in it or if some automaton is moving it. The man "the mannequin manager" arrives, pushes a large bottle of Coca-Cola and a sandwich into the mannequin through the opening on the back of the tyrannosaurus: "There's a man inside!", he says with a laugh in Serbian. I ask him where he is from: "Romania, Timisoara, neighbors!" After Romania joined the EU in 2007, hundreds of thousands of citizens of this country came to Spain, whose Romansh language was easier for them to learn than German, for example. "If they had not come, factories like Porcelanosa could have closed because they would have become uncompetitive in relation to Chinese and Turkish ceramic manufacturers. They are ready to work for 700 euros a month, and the Spaniards don't think of that!", the representative of this brand in Serbia told me back then in 2012.

Holy Grail

The Cathedral in Valencia in one of its chapels, according to the beliefs of many, keeps the Holy Grail, the jar that Jesus used at the Last Supper. A 1st-century jar with Arabic cathedral inscriptions was gifted in 1436 by the Spanish king Alfonso V of Aragon. Next to the Cathedral stands a group of tourists gathered around a guide pulling a branded cart with the inscription "Indiana Tours". Apparently Spielberg's film is the first association most tourists have when the biblical Holy Grail is mentioned.

In the Museum of Fine Arts, on the other side of the Turia's dry bed, we saw a painting of General Francisco Franco, a sight rarely seen in modern Spain, I only met him in the Legion Museum in Ceuta, the Spanish enclave on the African soil from which Franco started the Spanish Civil War war. We also saw an El Greco, a Hieronymus Bosch, many altars and other masterpieces of Spanish medieval art. Entrance to the museum is free.

Museum of Fine Arts

When you come to a city like Valencia, all your friends who have been there or lived in it will tell you where to have lunch. By the way, we like restaurants with gardens on the street that we stumble upon by chance, guided by that Sartre sentence: "When you come to a city for a few days, don't rush to see everything, but find the best pub and let the city pass before you!" However, this time we followed a few tips. One of them was the legendary restaurant "La Pepica", which opened in 1898 on the beach in Valencia. King Alfonso XIII granted a license to Francisco Balaguer Aranda and his wife Josefa Marquisa Sánchez and 44 other restaurateurs to erect wooden shacks on the beach in which to serve food and drink to bathers. The couple had eight children, and today their grandchildren and great-grandchildren run a restaurant on the walls of which are pictures of numerous famous guests, from King Philip of Spain to our own Peđa Mijatović, who played in Valencia.

If in Valencia you want to eat the Swiss specialty fondue with cheese (in our case - it always is), the only solution is "La Fondue". The restaurant is excellent and not expensive, but there are not many tables, so you have to reserve a place several days in advance. There we were served by a young blonde waiter who was immediately obvious that he was not Spanish. He came in March, in the first wave of refugees from Ukraine, when it was still possible.

Since we were in Valencia on Orthodox Christmas on January 7, I decided to check if there was a Russian church in the city and I found it in a small bar not far from the city center. Christmas service in the Russian Church of St. Đoźđa was at 18 pm, in the temple I found priest Sergej and a dozen believers, mostly elderly women. It was somehow shocking: the Russians, despised in most of Europe because of the war in Ukraine, like the first Christians, seem to celebrate their Christmas almost in secret.

The Museum of the History of Valencia is a little further from the city center. In the not overly impressive collection, the compilation of film journals from the beginning of the 20th century to the end of Franco's reign, which describe events in the city such as the Regional Exhibition in 1909, during which some of the most beautiful buildings were built, among them the famous Most Regionalne, attracts my attention the most. King Alfonso XIII, who ruled Spain for 45 years, from his birth in 1886 until the proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic in 1931, is on one of the recordings visiting the Exhibition. Alfonso XIII is the grandfather of the former king, the controversial Juan Carlos, and the great-grandfather of King Philip VI, the current Spanish ruler. . In the newsreels we also see scenes from the Second Spanish Republic (1931–1939) and the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), during which planes from Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany bombed the city 442 times, leaving behind 3.831 dead and 847 wounded. After Franco's victory in the war in 1939, Spain, including Valencia, was bypassed by the Second World War and the era of the city's recovery began, which, with greater or lesser acceleration, continues to this day.

The next morning I also visited the Museo Fallero de Valencia, dedicated to the Fallas festival from the beginning of the story. Namely, every year a special jury chooses the most beautiful doll to be "rescued" and later exhibited in this museum. There are also posters for "Fallas" from 1930 to the present day. An interesting poster from 1936. Four months after the festival of that year, the Civil War broke out and real fires were burning in the streets of Valencia and other Spanish cities.

I continued cycling towards the center and as I passed the cathedral I heard the sound of trumpets. I entered to find a scene of young men and women in traditional Spanish costumes offering the priest gifts in the form of flower arrangements accompanied by the pompous music of a brass band. Another of the many testimonies about how much the Spaniards hold on to their tradition and show it at every step.

La Lonja de la Seda, the Silk Exchange, a Gothic building opposite the Main Market in Valencia was built at the end of the 15th century, and during the Civil War (1936–1939) it hosted sessions of the Parliament of the Spanish Republic as well as the Anti-Fascist Exhibition. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and looks absolutely spectacular with high arches held up by thin "twisted" stone pillars.

Museum of Ceramics

Finally, I leave one more building whose beauty you can admire for hours. The Palacio del Marqués de Dos Aguas, which today houses the National Museum of Ceramics and Decorative Arts, is one of the most lavishly decorated buildings in Spain, perhaps in the world. The palace is said to have been built on a Roman cemetery and changed owners over the centuries until today it is owned by the Spanish state. The current appearance of the facade in rococo style dates from 1745. "La gran belleza", the Spanish would translate the famous Italian phrase. Beauty to die for. And because of which many actually died.