The Mikvé on Synagogue Street
A New Window into Pre-Expulsion Jewish Life in A Coruña, Spain
At the centre of a tiny plaza in the medieval quarter of A Coruña, a coastal city of 250,000 in northwestern Spain, stands a solitary willow tree that leans precariously towards the street. That’s the first clue: a willow is not a common tree to plant in a Spanish plaza. The second clue, a giveaway: the street is called Rua da Sinagoga, Synagogue Street.
No one had attended synagogue here since at least 1492 when A Coruña’s Jewish community was expelled along with the rest of Spain’s Jews. Instead, the cobblestone plaza is filled with the whirr of excavation machines and archaeologists’ vans — because when the city followed those clues, they led underground.
The excavators are unearthing the most recently discovered and best-preserved mikvé — Jewish ritual bath — in the Iberian Peninsula. While the other known mikvaot in the Spanish cities of Girona, Besalú, Córdoba, and Sagunto only spot the remains of the bath itself, A Coruña’s mikvé maintains its arched ceiling, walls (complete with rectangular notches where candles may have stood), and seven stairs for bathers to descend into the water. It is so intact that when archaeologists cleared the rubble, the bath began to fill with water again, running clear enough that it plausibly came from a spring — one of the halakhic requirements for a mikvé. Archaeologists confirmed the use of the mikvé in the second half of the 15th century, pre-expulsion, by carbon-dating a cod fish bone found at the site. The bath’s drainage system, too, still functioned, maintaining the water level at 1.60 to 1.70 meters and never allowing it to overflow.
When I visited the excavation of the mikvé in June, accompanied by Ana Deben Rodríguez, architect in the municipal government of A Coruña, this is exactly how I found it: filled with water to the perfect height, as if it were waiting patiently for its next bather. In the dark quiet, Deben Rodríguez shined her flashlight downward from where we stood on the steps and instructed me to look. The water was so clear that the light cast a neat circle on the stone floor of the bath.
I had been coming to A Coruña for the last eight years, visiting the hometown of the person who would become my husband and grew to love it. When the pandemic hit, we moved to the city, and I tried to follow the rhythms of Jewish time in a place that had forgotten them. On Shabbat, I used any candles I could find and baked my own matza on Pesach, but I was unable to find it in stores. I was the first Jew most people had ever met, and when I told them I studied Ladino, they asked what it was. But there was always Synagogue Street, and I’d find any excuse to walk down it, pulled to it as if by a magnet. Synagogue Street had helped me make a home in A Coruña, even if it was just a name.
But as I looked down into the mikvé underneath that street, the name became something more solid, something made of water and stone. When I began to cry, surprising myself, Deben Rodríguez was unfazed: an Argentinian Jew she had brought weeks before reacted the same way.
Beyond its emotional weight, the discovery of the mikvé is a watershed moment in the historiography of Jewish A Coruña. The city, located in Spain’s northwest corner in the autonomous region of Galicia, had a small Jewish population whose history is underdocumented and barely visible to contemporary residents and visitors. By the latter half of the 15th century, A Coruña’s Jewish population numbered fewer than 100 families. It possibly decreased to fewer than a dozen by 1491, according to Dr. María Gloria de Antonio Rubio, an expert in Galician Jewish history at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). But the small community is well-known among scholars because it left behind one of the most spectacular religious texts of the Middle Ages: the Kennicott Bible, an ornately illuminated manuscript of the Tanakh illustrated by the famed Joseph ibn Hayyim in A Coruña in 1476, which today sits in the Bodleian Library in Oxford.
Other Jewish residents of A Coruña had more mundane vocations and participated in the Atlantic coastal city’s maritime trade. A document from 1384 details a “new, big, and well-supplied” warehouse owned by Don David da Coruña which handled fish to be transported across the peninsula to the Mediterranean.
After the 1492 expulsion, the complex on Synagogue Street continued to be known to the city’s residents. An 1842 document signed by a judge described a cistern lying beneath the building, and in the latter half of the same century one of the city’s most illustrious writers, Emilia Pardo Bazán, described the “clear-watered spring” that filled the bath. The house on Synagogue Street remained a residence under private ownership until the city of A Coruña began to conduct archaeological surveys in 2019, later announcing in 2022 that it had purchased the building for 420,000 euros to continue research, rescuing it from plans to demolish it and develop on the site.
Under investigation is not only the mikvé but also the possible medieval synagogue above it — after five centuries, no one is sure exactly which building was the synagogue that presumably gave the street its name. Preliminary analyses have identified a lost alleyway which may have separated the mikvé building and the possible synagogue itself and confirmed that the complex’s entrance faced east, but clear evidence like an ark for the Torah scrolls or benches for congregants have yet to be found. Because a mikvé could have belonged to a private residence, its discovery alone doesn’t solve the mystery of the synagogue — and so archaeological investigations will continue. If it is found, it will be the only synagogue still standing in all of Galicia.
Once excavations are complete, city officials plan to open the site to the public as a cultural centre and museum of medieval religion, placing A Coruña on the network of Iberian cities that officially commemorate their Jewish histories. No plans for the museum have been published, but the remarkable roofed mikvé will certainly be the centrepiece. I hope that all of those with connections to Sefarad — both newfound and ancient — will be able to look down into the clear water and feel the same pang of home that I did. Fortunately, Galicians have a word for this: they call it morriña.
Originally published in Avlaremoz, a Turkish Jewish magazine, translated into Turkish by Nesi Altaras
