Two corbels next to the entrance to the church of Sant Jaume, on Ferran Street, remember the desecration of the temple during the civil war and the subsequent reconstruction after the end of the war. It could be said that they are two expiatory corbels. The church was occupied at the beginning of the war by the anarchist union CNT-FAI, whose initials still remain on the rear wall of the parish, on Calle de la Lleona.
On one of the corbels, you can read at the bottom 1936, the year the civil war began, and it shows a man and a woman destroying the church. In the parish on Ferran Street, among other acts of vandalism, the sculpture of an altarpiece from the 18th century was burned, when it was the church of the disappeared Trinitarian convent. The second image is dated 1940 and you can see several workers working on the reconstruction. Sculpting the two corbels and installing them inside the church was an act of reparation by the Franco regime, already in the postwar period, with which it intended to stage the violent chaos of the revolutionaries against the order of the new dictatorship.
The church was built at the end of the 14th century at the current number 28 Ferran Street, founded by a brotherhood of converted Jews in what was the Call Menor, a second Jewish quarter created in the mid-13th century, due to the growth of the community. Hebrew from Barcelona. The Call Major was located next to the street of the same name and the Palau de la Generalitat. Some sources indicate that the church was built on the remains of a synagogue. It was because of the temple’s Jewish past that a Star of David can be seen on the façade, added during the renovation that Josep Oriol Mestres directed between 1866 and 1880.
The church was ceded to the Trinitarians after the expulsion of the Jews in 1492, who expanded it to convert it into a convent, which was demolished after the confiscation of 1835. Only the church remained standing, which would acquire the status of parish of Sant Jaume, after the demolition of the one that was in the square of the same name.
