EXCERPT FROM SARA’S JOURNALMarch 28, 1999
Calle Conde de Barajas, Seville
Stepping into Semana Santa: Palm Sunday
Today 300,000 people have come to our neighborhood. The Sevillanos are
dressed elegantly, with high-heeled shoes and jackets and ties. Their children are even
more immaculate in baby blue silk, ribbons, short pants in plaid and grey flannel and
t-straps with knee socks.
We push through the crowd, from the Conservatory’s door, through
Calle Conde de Barajas to the Basilica Jesus de Gran Poder, the massive church,
tucked huge and permanent in our narrow corner. The crowd is a din of chatter. It seems
the Sevillanos never stop socializing, and so many of them in one place magnifies the
Andalusian phenomenon of standing and talking.
A striped umbrella canopies a trolley. Under the shade is a shallow
box, piled mountainous with huge, golden potato chips. These are a weekend delicacy
throughout the year, and today the hot potatoes sell along with candied nuts, lollipops of
marshmallow sculptures, pistachios and hundreds of thousands of pipas—sunflower
seeds.
The street may indulge a draft for the bar across the street. The doors
stand ajar, where customers bottleneck. Snackers are sardines, squashed shoulder to
shoulder at the counter with jamon and manchego, and bocadillos
filled with ham and tortillas. The Candyman, next door, is making a killing. He stays open
on Sundays this Spring, capitalizing on a believer’s sweet tooth.
The plaza in front of the church is saturated. Among the crowd stand a
few tables—with vendors selling incense, portraits of the Basilica’s Jesus,
mounted in frames and on clocks. The doors of the church are wide open in preparation for
the thousands of extra visitors. It’s Palm Sunday and everyone has come to see the pasos,
the floats bearing religious effigies—scenes from Christ’s Passion and statues
of the Virgin—before they are carried through the streets of Seville as processions
throughout the week. During Seville’s Semana Santa, or Holy Week, more than
100 of these pasos will be carried to Seville’s Cathedral and back by nazarenos,
members of some 60 brotherhoods dating as far back as the 13th century. Members
are penitents, and volunteer to stand with roughly fifty others under each 2000-kilogram
float, supporting the structure on their necks, pacing somberly to the procession’s
accompanying bands. Other nazarenos, up to 1500 for each procession, dress in long
robes with pointed hoods, anonymous in their penitence, carrying candles, incense, flags
or pocketfuls of candy to give away to the children spectators.
Palm Sunday marks the beginning of Seville’s Holy Week, and the
people come first to the churches and then to the streets to worship the Virgin of their
choice, to pay homage to a tradition whose pagan origins still show, with veneration for
specific effigies essential to the spirit of the processions. Certain churches and
brotherhoods are favored in a hierarchy of numbers and the miracle-working abilities of
the effigies. Our Jesus de Gran Poder is one of the legends, but every church in
Spain, no matter how small, contains a carved image of Jesus and another of the Virgin
Mary, and in the days leading up to Easter the two are lifted onto individual floats and
carried by hand through the streets.
The adoration of these icons, most fervently the Virgin, ties into the
people’s collective consciousness of what these icons represent. Spain, which now has
the seventh largest GNP in the world, also celebrates the mother as an almost sacred
figure—especially in Andalusia. Young women go to university and have careers, but
often choose to give up work outside the home after marriage to concentrate on their
families. Fathers play an active role in child-rearing, and can often be seen in the
streets and parks looking after their youngsters. Andalusia prospers as an intact,
family-oriented society successfully combining personal relationships and societal
ambition. The unique vitality of Semana Santa is a living reminder of what is true
in the hearts of Sevillanos—living an emotive life that values an aesthetic, a ritual
and a passionate veneration for what is sacred.
