This Tuesday, March 28, marks the centenary of the declaration as a National Monument of the monastery of Santa María de Sijena. To commemorate it, Aragón plans to hold an extraordinary Governing Council that day in the chapter house of the building. It will be the main act of a broad program with which they intend to value an emblematic architectural complex for the Aragonese Crown, but which in recent years has been the protagonist of a bitter conflict with Catalonia on account of the dispute over assets.
The high point of this controversy occurred in December 2017, when technicians from the Government of Aragon and agents of the Civil Guard appeared at the Museu de Lleida to seize by court order the 44 works in dispute for decades. It was a day of contrasts, where the protests and police charges at the gates of the exhibition center were superimposed on the scenes of joy experienced next to the Aragonese monastery to welcome these assets.
Those 44 pieces were added to the 51 returned a year earlier -also through the courts- by the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (MNAC). Since then, only a small part has been exhibited since many of them arrived in a poor state of conservation (the Museu de Lleida only exhibited seven of them, the most valuable, and the rest remained in the warehouses) and work is being done in their recovery.
Meanwhile, work is progressing in the old bedrooms to expand and improve the exhibition space that will be dedicated to these goods. With an investment of 1.8 million euros in the last two years, the works are advancing at a good pace, and government sources estimate that it will be inaugurated in the second half of the year with the addition of furniture and a museum discourse.
“There have been years of satisfaction for having managed to get the courts to agree with us in something that we had been demanding for years and of commitment to make Sijena an emblematic place,” says the general director of Heritage of the Aragonese Government, Marisancho Menjón. She will not be present at the extraordinary Council on Tuesday, where matters of regional interest will be discussed mainly, but she assures that it is a purely institutional event without “any intention of any color against anyone.”
The central day will be completed with a facsimile edition of the Sijena rule. The oldest version, from the 12th century, is in Latin and is preserved in the Provincial Historical Archive of Huesca. It is an unpublished text, practically unknown, that regulates the daily life of the female community.
It is also expected that this year the old liturgy of the monastery will be recovered, which remained intact for centuries and has not been celebrated since the San Juan nuns left the convent (1970). In addition, different talks, projections, exhibitions or the celebration in September of the chapter of the Spanish assembly of the Order of Malta, to which the San Juan congregation that owns the monastery belongs, are scheduled.
Meanwhile, it remains to be seen if in this 2023 the Supreme Court will rule once and for all on the final future of the mural paintings of the chapter house that the MNAC currently keeps but is claimed by its neighbors.
From Aragon, they ensure that everything is ready to receive them if justice falls on their side, for which they have drawn up a protocol for the reception, handling and placement of the works. Menjón pointed out that the refusal of the MNAC to allow the entry of the Aragonese technicians to prepare a possible transfer until there is no ruling from the Supreme Court supposes “a difficulty, but it will not imply a delay.”
In the event of a favorable sentence, she points out that it will not be an immediate execution and a deadline will be given for her return, and she is convinced that the technicians of the Catalan museum will collaborate in everything because “above political and judicial confrontations, they work for the heritage , and they will never allow (the works) to be damaged”.
The long litigation for the assets continues to raise blisters in both communities. At the end of 2022, the Museu de Lleida organized an exhibition entitled “Expolio” to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the return. With names as explicit as San Martín kidnapped, Lérida outraged, The plot, Expectation-Indignation or Virgin of the looting, the 25 participating Catalan artists expressed in their paintings the feelings that the forced delivery of the Sijena treasure provoked in them.
The exhibition caused widespread discomfort in Aragon due to the intentionality of the titles of the works. From the Sijena Sí platform, they denounced this exhibition as “outrageous” for giving space to “the lies unmasked in so many courts and now turned into authentic fake news” with the aim of “continuing to promote hatred, resentment and division between sister communities ”.
