Title

Monastery of Santa María la Real, provenance: Sacramenia, (Segovia)

Generic classification

Object

Century

Cultural context / style

Material

Provenance

Current location

Object history

The wanderings followed by an important part of the dependencies of the Bernardine monastery of Santa María de Sacramenia (Segovia) constitute one of the most surprising cases of the dispersion of the patrimony in Spain. Founded in 1141 by Alfonso VI, the Cistercian monastery of Sacramenia was erected between the end of the 12th and the beginning of the 13th century, with several later reforms, for example, the church had to be completed in the last years of the 14th century and the beginning of the 15th century. It was during the 19th century when the deterioration of the monastic complex began, as a result of the successive disentailment measures. In 1820 an inventory was made of all the monastery's assets and the following year it was acquired by Ramón Cano, a lawyer from Castrillo de Duero who, in a short period of time, dismantled the building: he tore off doors, railings, pavements, etc. A terrible robbery that left the entire monastic complex, with the exception of the church, in a deplorable state. In 1823, although the monastery was returned to the monks, the situation in which it found itself led them to undertake the essential restoration work. Their stay in the center was short-lived, since the disentailment of Mendizábal in 1835 led to the sale of the monastery, from which the church was excluded from the auction -which became the property of the State, which ceded it in usufruct to the bishopric of Segovia-.

A year later, the monastic buildings and the Sacramenia preserve were already the property of José Bustamante, an artillery brigadier, who kept the complex until it passed into the hands of the Guitián family, through the marriage of his daughter, Dolores Bustamante, to the artilleryman Carlos Guitián. Since then, the successive adaptation works submerged the monastery in a progressive deterioration: noble rooms were partitioned to be transformed into barns, stables, warehouses, in addition to serving as a cheap quarry of materials.

In such a situation came the offer of purchase of the monastic ensemble made by Arthur Byne, the purchasing agent in Spain of the collector W. R. Hearst. The sale took place in 1925 and the work to dismantle and move the complex, with the exception of the church, began quickly. In October 1926 the Provincial Commission of Monuments of Segovia reported: “only the remains of the buttresses and part of the doorway that gave access to the monastery are left, and at present the falsework is being prepared to dismantle the vault of the refectory. To our questions, the workers answered that the capitals and artistically carved stones had already been transported to Madrid, through the Peñafiel station” (Martínez Ruiz, 2008, pp. 196-2016).

35,784 stones, packed in 10. 751 wooden boxes, which Arthur Byne managed to export from the province of Segovia to New York, silencing with money all the agents who could hinder the operation: “The problems have been endless; several times during the summer the project was denounced to the Ministry of Fine Arts, but with my influence I managed to silence the press and the work could go ahead [...] Then I exercised all my personal influence directly with the Minister of Fine Arts and obtained permission to move all the stones already packed...” (translated. Merino de Cáceres, 1985, pp. 145-210). (The Minister of Public Instruction and Fine Arts was Eduardo Callejo de la Cuesta).

The truth is that once packed, the stones of the Sacramenia monastery were first transported by truck to Peñafiel (Valladolid) and from there by train to Madrid, then from Madrid to Cadiz, where they finally embarked for New York. They arrived at the New York port at the beginning of 1927; however, the abuse of the now dismantled complex of the old monastery did not cease at that time. The sanitary authorities immobilized the merchandise in the port of New York, due to the risk of foot-and-mouth disease; they opened the boxes and replaced the straw used for packaging with wood shavings. After the sanitary problems, and the time and money invested in solving this problem, the economic crisis of 1929 came, with serious effects for the accounts of the magnate Hearst, who never saw this Cistercian monastery -who presumably acquired it to use it for the museum he planned to create at the University of Berkeley, California, in memory of his mother Phoebe A. Hearst-. Hearst-.

The merchandise remained in a port warehouse for nearly twenty-five years. Upon Hearst's death in 1951, his heirs sought to dispose of the shipment at auction. The starting price at Gimbel's department store in New York was $50,000, but was later reduced to $19,000, but to no avail. The Hammer Galleries of New York finally managed to sell the monastery to the real estate developers E. Raymond Moss and William S. Edgemon, whose objective was to use the dismantled monastery as a tourist attraction in a planned leisure complex in Miami. The Sacramenia stones then made a new journey: from New York to the port of Everglades (Florida) and from there to Miami. The turbulent history did not end there, as the reassembly of the monastic buildings was really difficult (the marking of the eastern and western sides of the monastery had been marked on the stone blocks in both cases with an O, which caused many problems in the new construction). The rearrangement of such a complex architectural puzzle was carried out under the direction of A. Carswell, who had worked on the erection of The Cloisters in New York. The work was completed on August 20, 1954, although the medieval tourist project was not successful and had to be closed. At that point, lacking function and in a location so foreign to its place of origin, finally in 1962 the Episcopal Diocese of South Florida took over the property and transformed its premises in order to be adapted to the new Church of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, where the temple was located in the space that once constituted the refectory. (Merino de Cáceres and Martínez Ruiz, 2012, pp. 421-449; Merino de Cáceres, 2021).

Today it is known as Spanish Ancient Monastery. It is undoubtedly extraordinary, and a priori disconcerting, to have a medieval European Cistercian monastery in North Miami Beach (Florida), but also in Sacramenia (Segovia) where the church is preserved. Therefore, it is a monastery on two continents. The church is part of a privately owned property, the restoration of the temple in the aforementioned town of Segovia was undertaken by José Miguel Merino de Cáceres, who not only devoted considerable efforts to the recovery of what was still preserved in Sacramenia, but also to disseminate, through various publications, such an eventful and peculiar history.

Locations

• XII^th c. - 1926

  monastery

  Monastery of Santa María de Sacramenia, Sacramenia (Spain)

• 1926

  dealer/antiquarian

  Arthur Byne and Mildred Stapley Byne, Madrid (Spain) *

• 1926 - 1953

  private collection

  Collection of William R. Hearst, New York (United States) *

• 1954 - present

  monastery

  The Spanish Ancient Monastery, Florida (United States)