CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Spain’s Streets Are Named After Immigrants

Image by Getty and Unsplash .

I live my life surrounded by dead Middle Eastern men. They loom over my mornings from enamel street signs, glower from building façades and squat in the middle of traffic circles with stone hands raised in permanent theological objection. Every day I drink my coffee under the marble gaze of Syrian ascetics, Palestinian prophets, Egyptian hermits, Anatolian bishops—desert mystics who wandered out of the furnace of the Roman East preaching salvation and were eventually hacked to pieces for their trouble.

One might imagine I am describing Tehran: a capital draped in banners of martyrs, highways lined with portraits of sanctified youth dispatched into minefields by the devout fantasies of their elders. But no. This is modern Europe: tapas, wine bars, high-speed rail, gluten-free croissants—and entire municipal districts named after men who would today be detained at the airport for having the wrong birthplace and an alarming beard.

Mid-morning finds me drinking a caña in San Blas, staring at yet another plaque dedicated to a long-dead holy import from somewhere east of Athens. Here in Cáceres, like every city in Spain, the map reads like an immigration record from Late Antiquity: San Juan, San Francisco, Santiago, San Pedro—men who never saw Extremadura, never tasted jamón, never argued about parking permits, yet now preside eternally over the traffic lights.

Walk a few blocks farther—again San Juan and San Francisco—and the city begins to feel less like a municipality and more like a stone reliquary. Everywhere the same pattern: European towns stitched together with the names of Levantine mystics, Palestinian apostles, Anatolian bishops, Egyptian hermits… Foreigners all of them, desert theologians whose biographies usually end in dismemberment, burning, or flaying, now repackaged as decorative wayfinding devices for tourists looking for tapas.

The numbers whisper the same story. Tens of thousands of Spanish streets bear the names of saints, virgins, and religious figures, vastly outnumbering scientists, secular thinkers, or........

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