Do adro à praça: desenhos e significados da presença franciscana nas cidades de Marechal Deodoro e do Penedo – AL

Abstract

The churchyards of Franciscan houses in the northeastern Brazil are a vital living space in cities where they are inserted, since the end of the fifteen hundred, when it was erected the first monastery in Olinda. From Bahia to Paraiba, this "real school", which is composed of fourteen monasteries, helped define the urban landscape of the Brazilian coast and was a center for disseminating culture and customs through the churchyard. Within this context, in mid-seventeenth century, the Friars Minor founded his last two homes at the southernmost Province of Pernambuco, the convents of St. Mary Magdalene and Our Lady of the Angels, now located in Marechal Deodoro and Penedo cities, in the State of Alagoas, respectively. The relationship between the convent and the city, which touches the space of the churchyard, is the subject of this dissertation. The churchyard is a singular locus, it links the material and immaterial. It also sets up an important "piece" of research to understand the dynamics of urban history and old colonial towns, because it adds something beyond expressions of traditional material and immaterial nature: a physical existence directly linked to the conformation of the place. In colonial times, these cities, when they were "Pernambuco towns", were produced under the alliance between the "Cross" and "Crown", alluding to of homeland defense and the sacred precepts. As a consequence, conformed to the topography of the place, grew the Franciscan convents, and the churchyard, it was the main visual landmark together with the religious building, designed primarily for the collective practices of liturgy. Today, when most monasteries no longer plays its role fully, have few or no friar, the churchyards conform spaces for public use, which are, at the same time: essential for the monument, participants of a built heritage and central squares of the city. Thus, this study investigates the socio-cultural heritage established in the strongest phases and at moments of big changes in the relation of these monastic houses with the community and their respective cities, over the centuries. As a method, in addition to textual documents, iconographic sources were used, focusing primarily on the use of photographs and of the comparison in situ with the intention of identifying marks of these changes. In order to understand the dualities and coexistences of the interventions and appropriations in the churchyard, either through the activities promoted by the church or by secular practices conducted in the churchyard, the objective was to set the course of this space for public use in relation to the "movement" in its area, dialogue with the city, its logic design, alterning past and present, sacred and profane. Finally, we see the old churchyard changed into a square, fundamental as "free area" in current urban setting, being maintained as multiple and being still a pole of social attraction.