Food Feature: Rock of ages

Mexico City’s Templo Mayor rises from the rubble, bringing a forgotten era to light

I was almost too tired to be excited. I had been on the road for nearly three weeks, and I pulled into my last stop, Mexico City, after a hellish 14-hour bus ride from Palenque. This was my first trip into the interior of Mexico, and I had spent it ruin hopping, culminating with a stay in Mexico City to see the famous Templo Mayor, the Great Temple of the Aztecs.

Its very existence has become a symbol of ancient Mexico’s refusal to be forgotten — biding its time, nearly 400 years below the streets of Mexico City, until 1978. That year, electrical workers drilling underground struck a corner of a stone that turned out to be an eight-ton carving of Coyolxauhqui, goddess of the moon. For the next 20 years, archeologists did their thing, and the city watched in wonder as its history rose up from the ground at its feet.

Today you can enter the site itself. The morning after I arrived, sufficiently recovered from my bus ride, I headed to the city center to begin my exploration. I emerged from the metro and stepped back in time. The temple takes up one corner of the zocalo, the town plaza. On one side stands the Palacio National, built by can-do conquistador Hernan Cortez; on another is the Catedral Metropolitana, one of the oldest churches in the country. The zocalo they surround is the largest plaza in Mexico. Cortez staged the first bullfights in Mexico there. Nowadays it serves as a public meeting space — or is intended to. As I quickly crossed the paved expanse, I had only to share it with an overheated guard posted at the base of the flagpole in the center. Even in late October, the Mexican sun is relentless, and the plaza was turning into an enormous flagstone frying pan.

I had hoped to see the famous Aztec dancers that perform in front of the site. Clad in elaborate headdresses and costumes, they re-enact traditional dances accompanied by a single drum — every day, despite the sun and heat. But I was too late, and the dancers were gone, leaving their drummer and some of their gear propped on a curb. Disappointed, I ducked into a cool, dark shop in hopes of finding a cold drink. The shop was tiny and filled with people who, as my eyes adjusted to the dimness, turned out to be the Aztec dancers in full regalia, guzzling Coca-Colas. They brushed past me, costumes gleaming in the half-light.

The temple, like all of Mexico City, was built on filled-in swampland. Rebuilt and added to at least five times, it finally disappeared when the weighty building literally sank into the ground. To enter the ruin, I descended a rickety metal stairway, landing on a boardwalk that snaked through the ruins. The traffic and voices overhead faded, leaving me in an envelope of strangely motionless, heavy air. The Templo Mayor is no Chichen Itza. Instead of languishing in the jungle undiscovered for half a millennia, it sat right in Cortez’s face, reminding him — and, more importantly, the native populace he was trying so hard to subdue — of the grand civilization he had conquered. He dealt with it in a somewhat unenlightened manner: He had his men pound it to pieces. But as I walked through the ruin, it took only a little concentration to imagine the fire-blackened rubble as the grandest structure of its time, one that loomed over the city and was fronted with white limestone panels designed to catch the sun and make it visible for miles. It was the spiritual center of an empire. Even in desolation, an aura of power remained. The air was so still I could almost hear the voices of rulers, of priests and their victims. This was, after all, a temple dedicated to human sacrifice.

I climbed back up to street level and entered the Temple Museum, which houses all the artifacts recovered from the site. Prominently displayed is the stone that started it all, the carving of Coyolxauhqui, the moon goddess. The sculpture was so large I couldn’t really make out the pattern; it dissolved into a Rorschach of lines. I contented myself with following the spiral course of the displays.

Exquisite jade jewelry and metalwork were guarded by life-size statues of soldiers, impassive in eagle regalia that echoed the costumes of the dancers I had seen earlier. Smaller figurines represented lesser gods — including, to my amusement, a beer god. Several cases held carefully reconstructed burial sites. Some of them were identified as nobility or priestly burials, interred with the symbols and finery of office. Some were identified as “offerings,” and their gravesites were bare. Noble or slave, they had all lain hidden for 400 years while the survivors of their people recovered and rebuilt and finally no longer knew they were there, walking over the silent ruins, until one day a drill rang out as it struck a forgotten stone.

On the second floor, a mezzanine opened, allowing me to view the carving of the goddess from above. The intricate design coalesced into a stylized figure, frozen in a movement of dance and a moment in time. Turning around, I faced a huge plate glass window that looked down upon the ruins of the Templo Mayor. Lifting my eyes, I could see the ornate cathedral looming over it; even higher along the skyline the spire of the Torre Latino, a 20th-century skyscraper, pushed upward — three eras in one glance. Mexico City, holding onto its past, continues pushing forward.

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