Kochi

John:  The area called Kochi is actually a lot of different smaller places on islands and peninsulas arranged around a large harbor--in that way, it's not all that unlike the New York area.  There's the town of Fort Cochin itself, which is really a small island, and has both a nice beachfront and the original church that the Portuguese built here in the early sixteenth century. Next to that is the peninsula of Mattanchery, which has a 400-year old synagogue, the oldest in India, and a palace built by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century for the maharaja. Across the bay on the mainland is Ernakalum, which is the commercial center, with shops of all kinds facing on to Gandhi Road and the streets radiating off it.  Finally, right in the middle is Willingdon Island, which is largely a port center developed on landfill by the British in the 1930s, the last years of the Raj. That is where our ship is docked. 

The comparisons between Kochi and New York more or less end there, of course--Kochi is tropical, and while it's built up and not uncrowded, there are only about a million and a half people here, so it's the rare place in India that is less densely populated than similar square mileage in the US.  We've spent our time here seeing the sights:

• Fort Cochin is where the Portuguese in the person of Vasco de Gama and his crew showed up in the late fifteenth century and decided that they owned the place, in spite of the fact that there were already a lot of people here. One thing we've been reminded of on this trip is that the Portuguese really did get around back then, and were often the advance party for the Europeans who followed and established more permanent colonial rule. Brazil, South Africa, Mauritius, and now India--the Portuguese showed up in all of these places, often in the form of Vasco de Gama himself, although of course now Brazil is the only one of these countries where the Portuguese relationship is inescapable. The Portuguese did dominate here in western India for about a hundred years, though, and there are still some ruins of the Fort Emmanuel that they built right at the tip of the island. The most prominent building from their time here is St Francis of Assisi church, where Vasco, who died in Cochin,was first  buried:

St Francis of Assisi Church, with its Portuguese facade intact

Vasco's body was moved back to Lisbon a few years later, but you can still see where they buried him in the church.  The outside is largely original, but the interior was remodeled in the eighteenth century by the British when they converted it to an Anglican church, which it still is today. An odd experience just after this picture was taken; a young Indian woman traveling with her boyfriend or husband came to us and said "picture, please," which we interpreted that she wanted us to take a picture of her and her companion in front of the church. But no, she quickly got next to Maeve and her partner took their picture together--then she moved on. Maeve gets a lot of attention here--with her blond hair and blue eyes, she stands out. A lot of people want to touch her, about which she feels ambivalent.

Fort Cochin has a lot of old, quaint architecture; clearly a lot of British institutions were here at the time of the Raj--there are cricket grounds and hotels with a slightly mock-Tudor feel. There are also a lot of clothing stores catering to affluent Indians and Westerners, though they're not exactly in Western styles. People have been wearing them on the ship, and you'll start seeing some things in these blog posts. 

• The Portuguese were followed by the Dutch, who,among other things, renovated the Mattanchery Palace, also called,  the Dutch Palace n the seventeenth century. (It was actually built originally by the Portuguese as a form of compensation to the local maharaja for a raid they had undertaken.) This was where the local maharaja lived for the next couple of centuries; it's now divided between a temple, which is on the ground floor, and a museum on the second floor:

The Mattanchery or Dutch Palace--it's a little run down, but trust us, the inside is pretty spectacular.

The real treat here are murals on the second floor walls depicting scenes from the Ramayana and Mahabbarata, which are truly amazing. No pictures allowed, though, and as far as we can tell, you can't even get reproductions of them--we looked for books or postcards, but came up empty.

• But before the English, the Dutch, or the Portuguese, the area was home to a substantial Jewish population. Right near the Mattanchery Palace is an area called (alas) Jew Town, which has a beautiful synagogue built in 1568, the oldest synagogue in India. It's richly decorated with Belgian chandeliers and hand-painted Chinese floor tiles--clearly the congregation spared no expense in making this as lovely a place as they could. Again, there were no pictures allowed, and no reproductions available. 

Our own global citizens in front of the synagogue complex.

Unlike the European conquerors, whose arrival here can be dated precisely, no one really knows when the Jews arrived in Cochin, though it was surely centuries earlier than the synagogue was built--there's a gravestone in a nearby village with a headstone dated (incredibly) with the equivalent on the Jewish calendar of 1269 AD. And it's clear that this area of India was known for long before that because of the spice trade; this part of the world is mentioned in the Old Testament. Near the synagogue, there are a series of paintings depicting the history of the Jewish population here, starting with the purported arrival in 72 AD of a group who were exiled after the destruction of the second temple in Jerusalem in 70. It's completely fanciful, but charming--a group is getting out of boats, and the maharaja and his court are cheerfully welcoming them. Also unlike the Europeans, the Jews never tried to rule, convert, or conquer here; they primarily worked as merchants and traders, which is probably how they developed the relationships that enabled them to import things like Belgian chandeliers. 

The last of the paintings is also charming and a little poignant; it shows the maharaja addressing the congregation in the synagogue in 1947, at the moment of India's independence. The event depicted there marks the end, both of his power, and in some sense of the congregation. The new state of India ended the rule of the maharajas. And of course the next year, 1948 was when the modern state of Israel was created, and much of the congregation emigrated there. Now, there are only nine members in the congregation, which is almost surely in its last generation, the end of at least half a millennium of a remarkable community of global citizens.