 I think I’m a bit of a romantic. But since becoming a folklorist, I’ve developed an even deeper love and appreciation for home and place. Here’s a love story, about a place, particularly a neighborhood I once called home. A time when on a cold, dreich Glasgow day, I went searching for the bones of St Valentine, and found something else instead; a Catholic nun who loved The Rocky Horror Picture Show, a neighborhood alive with languages and traditions from many parts of the world, and a community that became my home.
Years ago, around the time I first moved to Glasgow, I went on a wee solo mission to find the bones of St Valentine. I’d heard they were somewhere on the south side of the city. So on a cold, dreich, rainy day, a typical Scottish day in fact, I took the number 44 bus from Glasgow’s west end, where I was living at the time, to the south side. I crossed the River Clyde into the Gorbals and walked to St Francis Church. I never actually found his bones. But I did discover that supposedly the relic had once sat in that church, in almost complete anonymity, for over a century. I also learned it had since been moved to another church nearby. There, I met Sister Isabel Smythe. Her office was at St Francis, and through interfaith projects we began working together and became friends. She was much older than me, a devoted Catholic, of course, a nun, though she didn’t wear traditional attire. She would tell me, with a mischievous smile, how she loved dressing up in a red velvet dress (as a nun!) to go and see The Rocky Horror Picture Show. She also loved walking in the annual Sikh Vaisakhi parade, visiting the Gurdwara, sitting down for Langar, the community meal, and sharing Daal and Roti. She was passionate about interfaith dialogue, a peace activist in the truest sense. She even became an official observer at the Protestant Orange fraternity marches, a staunch advocate for freedom of belief, and for dialogue between people of all faiths and traditions, which she believed was essential to tackling Scotland’s long and painful history of sectarian division. The following year, I moved to the south side and bought a tenement house just a few minutes’ walk from St Francis, in Govanhill, a neighborhood that was once part of the wider Gorbals. While I live in the United States now, this community is still one I consider one of my homeplaces. I still own that flat in Govanhill. And that neighborhood carries the layered history of Glasgow’s South Side, a kind of tartan style tapestry where Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, Baha’i, Buddhist, Jewish, and people of many other traditions and cultures live side by side. It is a place where, around 1938, many Jewish children, as part of the Kindertransport, came and settled to escape Nazi persecution, whose descendants I later got to work with when I worked at the Museum of Religion. At the corner shop newspaper stand you can find papers in Urdu, Polish, Arabic, Punjabi, Irish Gaelic, and more. There’s a large Somali and Roma community now. It’s full of family-run restaurants, Kurdish, Indian, Pakistani cafés, and has its own mini version of the curry mile, with Indian sweet shops where you can get the best Gulab Jamun outside of India, next to an ice cream and fish supper–style café established by descendants of multiple generations of Italian immigrants. This neighborhood proudly claims to be the most ethnically diverse neighborhood in all of Scotland, Scotland’s version of New York City’s Lower East Side. I remember my own neighbors telling me how they loved the fact that Mary Queen of Scots once had a battle with the English on their street. Today, it hosts international arts festivals and carnivals, and has one of the largest contemporary art galleries in Europe, transformed from an old tramway depot station. On one street there is a church, a mosque, and a Sikh Gurdwara all within short walking distance. I remember once seeing the Imam and an Episcopal priest simply going on a casual walk together. There’s no concrete evidence that the relic of St Valentine in Glasgow is the same St Valentine whom Pope Gelasius named February 14 a feast day for back in 496. But the story endured and that’s how stories often work, becoming part of the city’s heritage. Each year, the friars decorate the relic and offer prayers in honor of love. And over time, Glasgow became known as the “City of Love.” But for me, it was never really about the bones. It was the Gorbals. Govanhill. The volunteers at the soup kitchen where I volunteered. Sister Isabel. My neighbors. My twin Catholic goddaughters who still live there. That solo mission led me to fall in love with a place, and with some extraordinarily beautiful people. That is the relic of love I carry, in my heart and my sense of home. One that travels with me wherever I go. Kiran Singh Sirah This blog is part of Storytelling: A Gift of Hope, a curated initiative and blog series that explores the art of storytelling and its tremendous power to transform how we see ourselves and each other, not just despite our differences, but because of them. |