Walled-up in Seville (Rule, History of the inquisition, 1874, vol. 2)

Text: "I beheld, and the same horn made war with the saints, and prevailed against them;" "And he [the little horn] ... shall wear out the saints of the most High, ... and they shall be given into his hand until a time and times and the dividing of time." Daniel 7:21,25

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   The pit, with a trap-door, and the small cells with skeletons in them, embedded in lime, which Gavazzi saw in the Roman Inquisition, and will be presently described in his own words, were probably a variety of the same secret prison, as used in Italy. The same kind of sepulchre for the living was in use in Spain; and Mr. Wetherell, to whom I am indebted for the Spanish Cartilla described in the Appendix of Vol. I., wrote me the following account of what he had seen in Spain. He says, "I had often heard talk in Spain of the Emparedados (or persons walled up), and doubted about them; but at length I saw it. About fifteen ago (in the year 1840), the building of the Inquisition at Seville, being in ruins, was inhabited by a poor man, with his wife and child. This last, knocking about one of the rooms, moved a brick in the wall, where there proved to be what is called un zitaron,* covering or marking a space in the wall about a yard and a half wide by a foot or more in depth. At the bottom of this place were found, and I saw, the bones of two persons, which must have been built up in the manner described by Father Gavazzi."

   * Zitaron is peggiorative of zitára, dropping the Arabic article, which remains in the more perfect form, azitára; it is recognised by the Spanish Academy, which in the Diccionario del Academia explains it thus:—"A thin wall, like a tabique (partition-wall of bricks on edge to divide rooms), built of brick and lime. In some parts of Castilla the thick wall of the sides of the house, not the front, is also comprehended under this name. According to Father Guadix, quoted by Covarrubias, it is an Arabic word, which comes from zatar, a division, or covering, and the particle a being added, it becomes azatára." Now a wall of this kind, whether thick or thin, is not a main wall, is no part of the original structure, and is not necessary to the stability of the building. It may be run up at any time in the basement of a building in front of a main wall, either making one long and very narrow enclosure, or divided into small doorless cells. The victims may remain there to die slowly, or, as Gavazzi saw in Rome, the place being filled up with quicklime or with earth, they may be buried alive or suffocated at once. This done, the zitaron could be at any time removed, and not a trace of it remain, nor of the murders done in it.

Rule, William Harris, History of the inquisition from its establishment in the twelfth century to its extinction in the nineteenth, London: Hamilton, Adams & Co.; Wesleyan Conference Office; New York: Scribner, Welford & Co., 1874, vol. 2, p. 198.

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