Word: cloisters
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...proof of his penitence, Alfonso transformed the royal summer palace at Burgos' Las Huelgas del Rey into a cloister administered by the white-robed Order of Cistercian nuns. The cloister, Alfonso decreed, would also be the burial site for the dead of the House of Castile; the first of the royal bodies, that of baby Prince Sancho, was entombed there...
Forgotten Royalty. During the next 200 years, 37 members of the royal family were laid to rest there in hermetically sealed sarcophagi, and the tombs were untouched until the Napoleonic invasion of 1808, when French troops drove out the nuns and turned the cloister into a barracks. Later, when Wellington's troops in turn drove out the French, the nuns returned to their desecrated convent to find a ghastly spectacle: tombs torn open, their occupants (whose bodies the nuns regarded as sacred) sitting up or falling out haphazardly, valuables gone. The shocked nuns hastily replaced the bodies as best...
White-haired Lorenzo Garcia, the only man allowed within its walls, had been the cloister's sexton for almost 40 years when his curiosity about the tombs finally got the better of him. One night while the nuns were safely asleep, Garcia pried open one of the coffins with a heavy metal hook. After fishing around patiently, he pulled out a fragment of gold brocade. Then, afraid of a sound scolding from the abbess, he hid his find, kept his secret to himself. Finally Garcia confided in Archeologist José Luis Monteverde, curator of national property. Monteverde communicated with...
...turned them all down to go back to Oxford as provost of his old college. But the following year, in 1947, when a stricken and bankrupt Europe was feverishly fingering the hope just held out by the Marshall Plan, Ernie Bevin, now Foreign Minister, called Franks from his cloister to head the British delegation to the 16-nation Paris conference...
Judging by its appearance in Holiday, Harvard had now attained a new status. Descriptions like "Den of Dolts" and "Cloister of Cerebrums" were now old hat. Harvard had become a Resort, and Vag was dumbfounded. Why hadn't someone tipped him off sooner? Why had he gone on believing that Harvard was a struggle, an endurance test, an academic hoop race? Now it turned out that Vag, the academic renegade, had been the only one on the right track and had never realized his good fortune...