I thought this an interesting find. More here:
Hopefully it turns out to be him.
I thought that was interesting too. I liked that maybe-Cervantes was under tons of books. 
I also had no idea that he’d had his left arm shot up and rendered useless, and spent 5 years as a slave. Neat stuff.
Will opening his coffin unleash the curse of Don Quixote on an unwitting Spain? :eek:
Will life there begin to resemble a picaresque novel? :eek:
Its sounds like one Hell of a way to go.
“Are your sure its him…?”
“My friend, even after more than 400 years… that skull is STILL smiling…”
He is known as “El Manco de Lepanto” (The One-Handed Man of Lepanto), just as Shakespeare is known as The Bard.
Nice find; thanks for posting it.
The Quixote is not picaresque, but life in Spain has been full of picardía and picaresca since way before the genre was invented…
Barrio de las Letras means “Burough of Humanities” or, less literally but more appropriately, “Burough of the Writers”. It receives that name from the amount of famous writers who lived there during the Siglo de Oro, the Golden Century of Spanish arts.
He should have plagiarized Will…
“…and he’s going to the rodeo!”
Does anybody remember the biopic with Horst Bucholz? Jose Ferer was his Turkish captor, but unlike in Lawrence of Arabia he kept it on a platonic level.
Really. Pícaros have been afoot and often in charge in Spain and its former empire for a while now…
Yep, dude knew what real “adventure” could mean, and cost.
That wouldn’t have been in keeping with Spanish burial practices. Moving bones to ossuaries is a very old custom. Unless you can afford a personal mausoleum, you know your bones will eventually be moved.
Ferrer. Promise.
And Cervantes was proud of that nickname; so much so that when Avellaneda, the alleged writer of the Apocryphal Quixote, wrote in his novel disparaging remarks to the war wound of Cervantes, Cervantes felt insulted and was more driven to finish the real sequel of Don Quixote to answer properly and devastatingly to Avelllaneda.
It wasn’t in keeping with English practice either. A curse on a grave of the early 17th century was very unusual.
Still, not to go off topic but it’s noticeable that the greatest of Spanish writers(am I correct that he was viewed this way latterly during his life?) was buried in such an insignificant way. It makes Shakespeare’s burial almost a state funeral in comparison.
Yeah, but the curse itself goes against the Spanish practice of moving the bones.
It would be like saying “woe is he who puts salt on my fried egg!” Uh… they’re supposed to have salt…
I didn’t even know he was sick!
And it probably wouldn’t be plagiarizing Shakespeare. There’s not much reason to think he wrote that couplet.
All I know is, he wanted to be buried with that particular church because they had helped ransom him and his brother from slavery.
Update: They’ve found a chunk of wooden coffin with the initials M C on it. Said chunk was associated with a pile of bones from a bunch of different people. Sorting is ongoing.