The Miracle of the Handkerchief
Both Valencia and the French town of Vannes where he died, people are celebrating the 600th anniversary of the birth of Saint Vicente Ferrer, whose presence in the city can be located in various places, not all of them churches.
I tend to walk around Valencia looking upwards; which is probably why I bump into a lot of people.
But the thing is that most interesting things begin on the first floor of buildings, where you can see the architecture as it was before ugly shop fronts started to dominate the urban landscape
One such example is to be found just off the touristy Plaza de la Reina, in a tiny square full of interesting, artisan shops.
One of the shops is an antique bookshop, and up above the books is a plaque informing us of the ‘Miracle of the Mocadoret’.
A ‘mocadoret’ is a handkerchief and, according to legend, one of Valencia’s two Saint Vincent’s, San Vicente Ferrer, was preaching beside the church of Santos Juanes, next to the Cntral Market, on June 24th 1413 when, in order to explain to his congregation that thy must help the poor, who were all around them, he took out a handkerchief and told them to watch it fly.
There must have been quite a wind as it flew all the way to the square which currently bears the name of the miracle, before entering a window at what is now number 5.
Inside, at the time, there was a family dying of hunger, whose desperate plight was revealed to the people who saw the miracle, and who then helped them.
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