The Catalan Josep Gavín has a quite particular vocation: collecting images of saints and of Mary. He has won 4 Guinness Prizes, including one for being the collector with most images of St. Joseph (51,000). His Marian collection now runs to some 800,000 images of Our Lady. Josep Gavín is the director of Arxiu Gavin, the largest archive of religious images in Europe. “The most precious object for me is an image of St. Joseph that I salvaged on 20 July 1936 while the Capuchin church in which it was housed was burning at the beginning of the Spanish civil war”, he reminisces to SirEurope. “I work every day from seven in the morning to one o’clock at night, Sundays included”, says Gavín, who adds: “It’s a real vocation that has led me to 96 countries and enabled me to collect 800,000 images of the Madonna, of which 308,000 have already been classified, while the others still remain to be ordered”. Gavín explains that “it’s not always easy to distinguish the images: for example, the scene of the Presentation of Jesus to the Temple is often confused with the Purification of Mary in the Temple”. Gavín himself created the system of classification. The most popular saints, he explains, include St. Anthony and St. Rita, whereas “Padre Pio is not invoked here as much as he is in Italy”. Of the Guinness Prizes he possesses, one was awarded for the fact that he has discovered 62 romanesque churches in Catalonia, and another for his inventory, unique of its kind, of religious sites throughout Catalonia, comprising 26,444 buildings. Anyone who wants to contribute to the growth of the archive can do so by sending material to Arxiu Gavín, Av.Mas Fuster 57, 08197 Valldoreix, Catalogna, Spain.
