Body of evidence: a history of Irish iconoclasm | Thinkpiece | Architectural Review
►https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/body-of-evidence-a-history-of-irish-iconoclasm/10043394.article
Whether myth or fact, who we are is predicated on where we are. Growing up in Ireland, at school we were taught across many subjects, from history to religious studies, that ours was the fabled ‘land of saints and scholars’. It was a legend often articulated in architecture, from the edge-of-the-world monastic beehive cells of Skellig Michael to the medieval round towers where monks supposedly sought sanctuary from marauding Viking raiders. Ireland, we were told with questionable patriotic zeal, had ‘saved civilisation during the Dark Ages’. Ours was a nation of iconographers, a view that could be deciphered not just in the Book of Kells, but also in the built environment.